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BADDECK, AND THAT SORT 
OF THING 



BY 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

AUTHOR OF " MY SUMMER IN A GARDEN," " BACKLOG STUDIES," 
"SAUNTERINGS," ETC. 




^ ,' -'> l'.^ ?^^ ,', ,' 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 



THE L)»RARY 9f 
Two Oopies Keo6(vE» 

APR» 16 M 902 

COPYRISMT ENTRY 

Ct^SS ^XXa No, 
l-q '^ r 
COPY e. 



Copyright, 1874, • 
BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. 

Copyright, 1902, 
BY SUSAN LEE WARNER. 

A// rights reserved. 



f\0 



-^A 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. JS". A 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & C\npany 




^0 tng ^omratie 
JOSEPH H. TWICHELL 

SUMMER AND WINTER FRIEND 



WHOSE COMPANIONSHIP WOULD MAKE ANY JOURNEY 
A DELIGHTFUL MEMORY 



THESE NOTES OF A SUNNY FORTNIGHT 
IN THE PROVINCES 



ARE INSCRIBED. 



BADDECK, AND THAT SORT OF THING. 



I. 



"Ay, now I am in Arden : the more fool I; when I was at 
home, I was in a better place ; but travellers must be con- 
tent." — Touchstone. 




WO comrades and travellers, who sought 
a better country than the United States 
in the month of August, found themselves 
one evening in apparent possession of the ancient 
town of Boston. 

The shops were closed at early candle-light ; the 
fashionable inhabitants had retired into the coun- 
try, or into the second-story-back of their princely 
residences, and even an air of tender gloom set- 
tled upon the Common. The streets were almost 
empty, and one passed into the burnt district. 



8 BAD DECK, 



where the scarred ruins and the uplifting piles of 
new brick and stone spread abroad under the 
flooding light of a full moon like another Pompeii, 
without any increase in his feeling of tranquil 
seclusion. Even the news-offices had put up their 
shutters, and a confiding stranger could nowhere 
buy a guide-book to heljD his wandering feet about 
the reposeful city, or to show him how to get out 
of it. There was, to be sure, a cheerful tinkle of 
horse-car bells in the air, and in the creeping 
vehicles which created this levity of sound were 
a few lonesome passengers on their way to Scol- 
lay's Square ; but the two travellers, not having 
well-regulated minds, had no desire to go there. 
What would have become of Boston if the great 
fire had reached this sacred point of pilgrimage 
no merely human mind can imagine. Without 
it, I suppose the horse-cars would go continually 
round and round, never stopping, until the cars 
fell away piecemeal on the track, and the horses 
collapsed into a mere mass of bones and harness, 
and the brown-covered books from the Public Li- 
brary, in the hands of the fading virgins who 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 9 

carried them, had accumulated fines to an incal- 
culable amount. 

Boston, notwithstanding its partial destruction 
by fire, is still a good place to start from. When 
one meditates an excursion into an unknown and 
perhaps perilous land, ^vhere the flag will not pro- 
tect him and the greenback will only partially 
support him, he likes to steady and tranquillize 
his mind by a peaceful halt and a serene start. 
So we — for the intelligent reader has already 
identified us with the two travellers — resolved to 
spend the last night, before beginning our jour- 
ney, in the quiet of a Boston hotel. Some people 
go into the country for quiet : we knew better. 
The country is no place for sleep. The general 
absence of sound which prevails at night is only a 
sort of background which brings out more vividly 
the special and unexpected disturbances which are 
suddenly sprung upon the restless listener. There 
are a thousand pokerish noises that no one can 
account for, which excite the nerves to acute 
watchfulness. It is still early, and one is begin- 
ning to be lulled by the frogs and the crickets, 
1* 



10 BADDECK, 



when the faint rattle of a drum is heard, — just 
a few prehmiuary taps. But the soul takes alarm, 
and well it may, for a roll follows, and then a rub- 
a-dub-dub, and the farmer's boy who is handling 
the sticks and pounding the distended skin in a 
neighboring horse-shed begins to pour out his 
patriotism in that unending repetition of rub-a- 
dub-dub which is supposed to represent love of 
country in the young. When the boy is tired 
out and quits the field, the faithful watch-dog 
opens out upon the stilly night. He is the 
guardian of his master's slumbers. The howls of 
the faithful creature are answered by barks and 
yelps from all the farm-houses for a mile around, 
and exceedingly poor barking it usually is, until 
all the serenity of the night is torn to shreds. 
This is, however, only the opening of the orches- 
tra. The cocks wake up if there is the faint- 
est moonshine and begin an antiphonal service 
between responsive barn-yards. It is not the 
clear clarion of chanticleer that is heard in the 
morn of English poetry, but a harsh chorus of 
cracked voices, hoarse and abortive attempts. 



AND TEAT SORT OF THING. 11 

squawks of young experimenters, and some inde- 
scribable thing besides, for I believe even the hens 
crow in these days. Distracting as all this is, 
however, happy is the man who does Hot hear a 
goat lamenting in the night. The goat is the 
most exasperating of the animal creation. He 
cries like a deserted baby, but he does it with- 
out any regularity. One can accustom himself 
to any expression of suffering that is regular. 
The annoyance of the goat is in the dreadful wait- 
ing for the uncertain sound of the next wavering 
bleat. It is the fearful expectation of that, min- 
gled with the faint hope that the last was the last, 
that aggravates the tossing listener until he has 
murder in his heart. He longs for daylight, hop- 
ing that the voices of the night will then cease, 
and that sleep will come with the blessed morning. 
But he has forgotten the birds, who at the first 
streak of gray in the east have assembled in the 
trees near his chamber-window, and keep up for 
an hour the most rasping dissonance, — an orches- 
tra in which each artist is tuning his instrument, 
setting it in a dififerent key and to play a different 



12 BADDECK, 



tune : each bird recalls a different tune, and none 
sings Annie Laurie, — to pervert Bayard Taylor's 
song. 

Give us the quiet of a city on the night before 
a journey. As we mounted skyward in our hotel, 
and went to bed in a serene altitude, we congratu- 
lated ourselves upon a reposeful night. It began 
well. But as we sank into the first doze, we were 
startled by a sudden crash. Was it an earth- 
quake, or another fire 1 Were the neighboring 
buildings all tumbling in upon us, or had a bomb 
fallen into the neighboring crockery-store'? It 
was the suddenness of the onset that startled us, 
for we soon perceived that it began with the clash 
of cymbals, the pounding of drums, and the blar- 
ing of dreadful brass. It was somebody's idea of 
music. It opened without warning. The men 
composing the band of brass must have stolen 
silently into the alley about the sleeping hotel, 
and burst into the clamor of a rattling quickstep, 
on purpose. The horrible sound thus suddenly 
let loose had no chance of escape ; it bounded 
back from wall to wall, like the clapping of boards 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 13 

in a tunnel, rattling windows and stunning all ears, 
in a vain attempt to get out over the roofs. But 
such music does not go up. What could have 
been the intention of this assault we could not 
conjecture. It was a time of profound peace 
through the country; we had ordered no spon- 
taneous serenade, if it was a serenade. Perhaps 
the Boston bands have that habit of going into an 
alley and disciplining their nerves by letting out 
a tune too big for the alley, and taking the shock 
of its reverberation. It may be well enough for 
the band, but many a poor sinner in the hotel that 
night must have thought the judgment day had 
sprung upon him. Perhaps the band had some 
remorse, for by and by it leaked out of the alley, 
in humble, apologetic retreat, as if somebody had 
thrown something at it from the sixth-story win- 
dow, softly breathing as it retired the notes of 
Fair Harvard. 

The band had scarcely departed for some other 
haunt of slumber and weariness, when the notes of 
singing floated up that prolific alley, like the sweet 
tenor voice of one bewailing the prohibitory move- 



14 BADDECK, 



ment; and for an hour or more a succession of 
young bacchanals, who were evidently wandering 
about in search of the Maine Law, lifted up their 
voices in song. Boston seems to be full of good 
singers ; but they will ruin their voices by this 
night exercise, and so the city will cease to be at- 
tractive to travellers who would like to sleep there. 
But this entertainment did not last the night out. 
It stopped just before the hotel porter began to 
come around to rouse the travellers who had said 
the night before that they wanted to be awakened. 
In all well-regulated hotels this process begins at 
two o'clock and keeps up till seven. If the porter 
is at all faithful, he wakes up everybody in the 
house ; if he is a shirk, he only rouses the wrong 
people. We treated the pounding of the porter 
on our door with silent contempt. At the next 
door he had better luck. Pound, pound. An 
angry voice, "What do you wanf?" 

" Time to take the train, sir." 

" Not going to take any train." 

" Ain't your name Smith 1 " 

"Yes." 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 15 

"Well, Smith — " 

"I left no order to be called." (Indistinct 
grumbling from Smith's room.) 

Porter is heard shuffling slowly ofif down the 
passage. In a little while he returns to Smith's 
door, evidently not satisfied in his mind. Rap, 
rap, rap ! 

" Well, what now 1 " 

"What's your initials?" 

"A. T. ; clear out!" 

And the porter shambles away again in his 
slippers, grumbling something about a mistake. 
The idea of waking a man up in the middle of the 
night to ask him his "initials" was ridiculous 
enough to banish sleep for another hom\ A 
person named Smith, when he travels, should 
leave his initials outside the door with his boots. 

Refreshed by this reposeful night, and eager to 
exchange the stagnation of the shore for the 
tumult of the ocean, we departed next morning for 
Baddeck by the most direct route. This we 
found, by diligent study of fascinating prospec- 
tuses of travel, to be by the boats of the Inter- 



16 BAD DECK, 



national Steamship Company ; and when, at eight 
o'clock in the morning, we stepped aboard one of 
them from Commercial Wharf, we felt that half 
our journey and the most perplexing part of it 
was accomplished. We had put ourselves upon 
a great line of travel, and had only to resign our- 
selves to its flow in order to reach the desired 
haven. The agent at the wharf assured us that 
it was not necessary to buy through tickets to 
Baddeck, — he spoke of it as if it were as easy a 
place to find as Swampscott, — it was a conspicu- 
ous name on the cards of the company, we should 
go right on from St. John without difficulty. The 
easy familiarity of this official with Baddeck, in 
short, made us ashamed to exhibit any anxiety 
about its situation or the means of approach to it. 
Subsequent experience led us to believe that the 
only man in the world, out of Baddeck, who knew 
anything about it lives in Boston, and sells tickets 
to it, or rather towards it. 

There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage 
like the beginning of it, when the traveller is 
settled simply as to his destination, and commits 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 17 

himself to his unknown fate and all the anticipa- 
tions of adventure before him. We experienced 
this pleasure as we ascended to the deck of the 
steamboat and snuffed the fresh air of Boston 
Harbor. What a beautiful harbor it is, everybody 
says, with its irregularly indented shores and its 
islands. Being strangers, we want to know the 
names of the islands, and to have Fort Warren, 
which has a national reputation, pointed out. As 
usual on a steamboat, no one is certain about the 
names, and the little geographical knowledge we 
have is soon hopelessly confused. We make out 
South Boston very plainly : a tourist is looking 
at its warehouses through his opera-glass, and 
telling his boy about a recent fire there. We 
find out afterwards that it was East Boston. We 
pass to the stern of the boat for a last look at 
Boston itself; and while there we have the pleas- 
ure of showing inquirers the Monument and the 
State House. We do this with easy familiarity ; 
but where there are so many tall factory chimneys, 
it is not so easy to point out the Monument as 
one may think. 

B 



18 BADDECK, 



The day is simply delicious, when we get away 
from the imozoned air of the land. The sky is 
cloudless, and the water sparkles like the top of 
a glass of champagne. We intend by and by to 
sit down and look at it for half a day, basking 
in the sunshine and pleasing ourselves with the 
shifting and dancing of the waves. Now we are 
busy running about from side to side to see the 
islands, Governor's, Castle, Long, Deer, and the 
others. When, at length, we find Fort Warren, 
it is not nearly so grim and gloomy as we had 
expected, and is rather a pleasure-place than a 
prison in appearance. We are conscious, however, 
of a patriotic emotion as we pass its green turf 
and peeping guns. Leaving on our right Lo veil's 
Island and the Great and Outer Brewster, we 
stand away north along the jagged Massachusetts 
shore. These outer islands look cold and wind- 
swept even in summer, and have a hardness of 
outline which is very far from the aspect of sum- 
mer isles in summer seas. They are too low and 
bare for beaut}^ and all the coast is of the most 
retiring and humble description. Nature makes 



AND THAI' SORT OF THING. 19 

some compensation for this lowness by an eccen- 
tricity of indentation which looks very picturesque 
on the map, and sometimes striking, as where 
Lynn stretches out a slender arm with knobby 
Nahant at the end, like a New Zealand war-club. 
We sit and watch this shore as we glide by with 
a placid delight. Its curves and low promon- 
tories are getting to be speckled with villages and 
dwellings, like the shores of the Bay of Naples ; 
we see the white spires, the summer cottages of 
wealth, the brown farm-houses with an occasional 
orchard, the gleam of a white beach, and now 
and then the flag of some many-piazzaed hotel. 
The sunlight is the glory of it all ; it must have 
quite another attraction — that of melancholy — 
under a gray sky and with a lead-colored water 
foreground. 

There is not much on the steamboat to distract 
our attention from the study of physical geography. 
All the fashionable travellers had gone on the pre- 
vious boat or were waiting for the next one. The 
passengers were mostly people who belonged in the 
Provinces and had the listless provincial air, with 



20 BADDECK, 



a Boston commercial traveller or two, and a few 
gentlemen from the republic of Ireland, dressed in 
their uncomfortable Sunday clothes. If any acci- 
dent should happen to the boat, it was doubtful if 
there were persons on board who could draw up 
and pass the proper resolutions of thanks to the 
officers. I heard one of these Irish gentlemen, 
whose satin vest was insufficient to repress the 
mountainous protuberance of his shirt-bosom, en- 
lightening an admiring friend as to his idiosyncra- 
sies. It appeared that he was that sort of a man 
that, if a man wanted anything of him, he had only 
to speak for it " wunst " ; and that one of his pe- 
culiarities was an instant response of the deltoid 
muscle to the brain, though he did not express it 
in that language. He went on to explain to his 
auditor that he was so constituted physically that 
whenever he saw a fight, no matter whose property 
it w^as, he lost all control of himself This sort 
of confidence poured out to a single friend, in a re- 
tired place on the guard of the boat, in an unexcit- 
ed tone, was evidence of the man's simplicity and 
sincerity. The very act of travelling, I have no- 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 21 

ticed, seems to open a man's heart, so that he will 
impart to a chance acquaintance his losses, his dis- 
eases, his table preferences, his disappointments 
in love or in politics, and his most secret hopes. 
One sees everywhere this beautiful human trait, 
this craving for sympathy. There was the old lady, 
in the antique bonnet and plain cotton gloves, who 
got aboard the express train at a way-station on 
the Connecticut River Road. She wanted to go, 
let us say, to Peak's Four Corners. It seemed that 
the train did not usually stop there, but it appeared 
afterwards that the obliging conductor had told her 
to get aboard and he would let her off at Peak's. 
When she stepped into the car, in a flustered con- 
dition, carrying her large bandbox, she began to 
ask all the passengers, in turn, if this was the 
right train, and if it stopped at Peak's. The infor- 
mation she received w^as various, but the weight 
of it was discouraging, and some of the passengers 
urged her to get off without delay, before the train 
should start. The poor woman got off, and pretty 
soon came back again, sent by the conductor ; but 
her mind was not settled, for she repeated her 



22 BADDECK, 



questions to every person who passed her seat, 
and their answers still more discomposed her. 
" Sit perfectly still," said the conductor, when he 
came by. " You must get out and wait for a way 
train," said the passengers, who knew. In this 
confusion, the train moved off, just as the old lady 
had about made up her mind to quit the car, when 
her distraction was completed by the discovery 
that her hair trunk was not on board. She saw it 
standing on the open platform, as we passed, and 
after one look of terror, and a dash at the window, 
she subsided into her seat, grasping her bandbox, 
with a vacant look of utter despair. Fate now 
seemed to have done its worst, and she was re- 
signed to it. I am sure it was no mere curiosity, 
but a desire to be of service, that led me to approach 
her and say, "Madam, where are you going?" 

" The Lord only knows," was the utterly candid 
response ; but then, forgetting everything in her 
last misfortune and impelled to a burst of con- 
fidence, she began to tell me her troubles. She 
informed me that her youngest daughter was 
about to be man'ied, and that all her wedding- 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 23 

clothes and all her summer clothes were in that 
trunk ; and as she said this she gave a glance out 
of the window as if she hoped it might be follow- 
ing her. What would become of them all now, 
all brand new, she did n't know, nor what would 
become of her or her daughter. And then she told 
me, article by article and piece by piece, all that 
that trunk contained, the very names of which had 
an unfamiliar sound in a railway-car, and how 
many sets and pairs there were of each. It seemed 
to be a relief to the old lady to make public this 
catalogue which filled all her mind ; and there was 
a pathos in the revelation that I cannot convey in 
words. And though I am compelled, by way of 
illustration, to give this incident, no bribery or 
torture shall ever extract from me a statement of 
the contents of that hair trunk. 

We were now passing Nahant, and we should 
have seen Longfellow's cottage and the waves beat- 
ing on the rocks before it, if we had been near 
enough. As it was, we could only faintly dis- 
tinguish the headland and note the white beach 
of Lynn. The fact is, that in travel one is almost 



24 BADDECK, 

as much dependent upon imagination and memory 
as he is at home. Somehow, we seldom get near 
enough to anything. The interest of all this coast 
which we had come to inspect was mainly literary 
and historical. And no country is of much inter- 
est until legends and poetry have draped it in hues 
that mere nature cannot produce. We looked at 
Nahant for Longfellow's sake; we strained our 
eyes to make out Marblehead on account of Whit- 
tier's ballad ; we scrutinized the entrance to Salem 
Harbor because a genius once sat in its decaying 
custom-house and made of it a throne of the im- 
agination. Upon this low shore line, which lies 
blinking in the midday sun, the waves of history 
have beaten for two centuries and a half, and 
romance has had time to grow there. Out of any 
of these coves might have sailed Sir Patrick Spens 
• " to Noroway, to Noroway," — 

" They hadna sailed upon the sea 
A day hut harely three, 
Till loud and boisterous grew the wind, 
And gurly grew the sea." 

The sea was anything but gurly now ; it lay idle 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 25 

and shining in an August holiday. It seemed as 
if we could sit all day and watch the suggestive 
shore and dream about it. But we could not. 
No man, and few women, can sit all day on those 
little round penitential stools that the company 
provide for the discomfort of their passengers. 
There is no scenery in the world that can be en- 
joyed from one of those stools. And when the 
traveller is at sea, with the land falling away in 
his horizon, and has to create his own scenery by 
an effort of the imagination, these stools are no 
assistance to him. The imagination, when one is 
sitting, will not work unless the back is supported. 
Besides, it began to be cold ; notwithstanding 
the shiny, specious appearance of things, it was 
cold, except in a sheltered nook or two where the 
sun beat. This was nothing to be complained of 
by persons who had left the parching land in order 
to get cool. They knew that there would be a 
wind and a draught everywhere, and that they 
would be occupied nearly all the time in moving 
the little stools about to get out of the wind, or 
out of the sun, or out of something that is inherent 
2 



26 BADDECK, 



in a steamboat. Most people enjoy riding on a 
steamboat, shaking and trembling and cliow-chow- 
ing along in pleasant weather out of sight of land ; 
and they do not feel any ennui, as may be inferred 
from the intense excitement which seizes them 
w^hen a poor porpoise leaps from the water half a 
mile away. "Did yo\i see the porpoise 1 " makes 
conversation for an hour. On our steamboat there 
was a man who said he saw a whale, saw him just 
as plain, off to the east, come up to blow ; appeared 
to be a young one. I wonder where all these men 
come from who always see a whale. I never was 
on a sea-steamer yet that there was not one of 
these men. 

We sailed from Boston Harbor straight for Cape 
Ann, and passed close by the twin lighthouses of 
Thacher, so near that we could see the lanterns 
and the stone gardens, and the young barbarians 
of Thacher all at play; and then we bore away, 
straight over the trackless Atlantic, across that 
part of the map where the title and the publisher's 
name are usually printed, for the foreign city of 
St. John. It was after we passed these lighthouser 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 27 

that we did n't see the whale, and began to regret 
the hard fate that took us away from a view of the 
Isles of Shoals. I am not tempted to introduce 
them into this sketch, much as its surface needs 
their romantic color, for truth is stronger in me 
than the love of giving a deceitful pleasure. There 
will be nothing in this record that we did not see, 
or might not have seen. For instance, it might 
not be wrong to describe a coast, a town, or an 
island that we passed while we were performing 
our morning toilets in our state-rooms. The trav- 
eller owes a duty to his readers, and if he is now 
and then too weary or too indifferent to go out 
from the cabin to survey a prosperous village where 
a landing is made, he has no right to cause the 
reader to suffer by his indolence. He should de- 
scribe the village. 

I had intended to describe the Maine coast, 
which is as fascinating on the map as that of 
Norway. We had all the feelings appropriate to 
nearness to it, but we could n't see it. Before we 
came abreast of it night had settled down, and 
there was around us only a gray and melancholy 



28 BAD DECK, 



waste of salt water. To be sure it was a lovely 
night, with a young moon in its sky, — 
*' I saw the new moon late yestreen 
Wi' the anld moon in her arms," — 

and we kept an anxious lookout for the Maine 
hills that push so boldly down into the sea. At 
length we saw them, — faint, dusky shadows in 
the horizon, looming up in an ashy color and 
with a most poetical light. We made out clearly 
Mt. Desert, and felt repaid for our journey by 
the sight of this famous island, even at such a dis- 
tance. I pointed out the hills to the man at the 
wheel, and asked if we should go any nearer to 
Mt. Desert. 

" Them ! " said he, with the merited contempt 
which ofl&cials in this country have for inquisitive 
travellers, — " them 's Camden Hills. You won't 
see Mt. Desert till midnight, and then you 
won't." 

One always likes to weave in a little romance 
with summer travel on a steamboat ; and we 
came aboard this one with the purpose and the 
language to do so. But there was an absolute 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 29 

want of material, that would hardly be credited 
if we went into details. The first meeting of the 
passengers at the dinner-table revealed it. There 
is a kind of female plainness which is pathetic, 
and many persons can truly say that to them it 
is homelike ; and there are vulgarities of manner 
that are interesting ; and there are peculiarities, 
pleasant or the reverse, which attract one's atten- 
tion : but there was absolutely nothing of this 
sort on our boat. The female passengers were 
all neutrals, incapable, I should say, of making 
any impression whatever even under the most fa- 
vorable circumstances. They were probably women 
of the Provinces, and took their neutral tint from 
the foggy land they inhabit, which is neither a 
republic nor a monarchy, but merely a languid 
expectation of something undefined. . My com- 
rade was disposed to resent the dearth of beauty, 
not only on this vessel but throughout the Prov- 
inces generally, — a resentment that could be 
shown to be unjust, for this was evidently not 
the season for beauty in these lands, and it was 
probably a bad year for it. Nor should an 



30 BADDECK, 



American of the United States be forward to set 
up his standard of taste in such matters ; neither 
in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, nor Cape Breton 
have I heard the inhabitants complain of the 
plainness of the women. 

On such a night two lovers might have been 
seen, but not on our boat, leaning over the taff- 
rail, — if that is the name of the fence around 
the cabin-deck, — looking at the moon in the 
western sky and the long track of light in the 
steamer's wake with unutterable tenderness. For 
the sea w\as perfectly smooth, so smooth as not 
to interfere with the most perfect tenderness of 
feeling ; and the vessel forged ahead under the 
stars of the soft night with an adventurous free- 
dom that almost concealed the commercial na- 
ture of her mission. It seemed ■ — this voyaging 
through the sparkling water, under the scintillat- 
ing heavens, this resolute pushing into the open- 
ing splendors of night — like a pleasure trip. 
"It is the witching hour of half past ten," said 
my comrade, "let us turn in." (The reader will 
notice the consideration for her feelins^s which has 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 31 

omitted the usual description of "a sunset at 
sea.") 

When we looked from our state-room window in 
the morning we saw kind. We were passing with- 
in a stone's throw of a pale-green and rather cold- 
looking coast, with few trees or other evidences 
of fertile soil. Upon going out I found that we 
were in the harbor of Eastport. I found also the 
usual tourist who had been up, shivering in his 
winter overcoat, since four o'clock. He described 
to me the magnificent sunrise, and the lifting of 
the fog from islands and capes, in language that 
made me rejoice that he had seen it. He knew 
all about the harbor. That wooden town at the 
foot of it, with the white spire, was Lubec ; that 
wooden town we were approaching was Eastport. 
The long island stretching clear across the harbor 
was Campobello. We had been obliged to go 
round it, a dozen miles out of our way, to get in, 
because the tide was in such a stage that we 
could not enter by the Lubec Channel. We had 
been obliged to enter an American harbor by 
British waters. 



32 BAD DECK, 



We approached Eastport with a great deal of 
curiosity and considerable respect. It had been 
one of the cities of the imagination. Lying in the 
far east of our great territory, a military and even 
a sort of naval station, a conspicuous name on the 
map, prominent in boundary disputes and in war 
operations, frequent in telegraphic despatches, — 
we had imagined it a solid city, with some Oriental, 
if decayed, peculiarity, a port of trade and com- 
merce. The tourist informed me that Eastport 
looked very well at a distance, with the sun shin- 
ing on its white houses. When w^e landed at its 
wooden dock we saw that it consisted of a few 
piles of lumber, a sprinkling of small cheap houses 
along a sidehill, a big hotel with a flag-staff, and a 
very peaceful looking arsenal. It is doubtless a 
very enterprising and deserving city, but its as- 
pect that morning was that of cheapness, newness, 
and stagnation, with no compensating picturesque- 
ness. White paint alwaj^s looks chilly under a 
gray sky and on naked hills. Even in hot Au- 
gust the place seemed bleak. The tourist, who 
went ashore with a view to breakfast, said that it 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 33 

would be a good place to stay in and go a-fish- 
ing and picnicking on Campobello Island. It has 
another advantage for the wicked over other 
Maine towns. Owing to the contiguity of British 
territory, the I\Iaine Law is constantly evaded, 
in spirit. The thirsty citizen or sailor has only 
to step into a boat and give it a shove or two 
across the narrow stream that separates the 
United States from Deer Island and land, when 
he can ruin his breath, and return before he is 
missed. 

This might be a cause of war with England, 
but it is not the most serious grievance here. 
The possession by the British of the island of 
Campobello is an insufferable menace and imperti- 
nence. I write with the full knowledge of what 
war is. We ought to instantly dislodge the Brit- 
ish from Campobello. It entirely shuts up and 
commands our harbor, — one of our chief Eastern 
harbors and war stations, w^here we keep a flag 
and cannon and some soldiers, and where the 
customs officers look out for smuggling. There is 
no way to get into our own harbor, except in 



34 BADDECK, 



favorable conditions of the tide, without begging 
the courtesy of a passage through British waters. 
Why is England permitted to stretch along down 
our coast in this straggling and inquisitive man- 
ner 1 She might almost as well own Long Island. 
It was impossible to prevent our cheeks mantling 
with shame as we thought of this, and saw our- 
selves, free American citizens, land-locked by alien 
soil in our own harbor. 

We ought to have war, if war is necessary to 
possess Campobello and Deer Islands ; or else we 
ought to give the British Eastport. I am not 
sure but the latter would be the better course. 

With this war spirit in our hearts, we sailed 
away into the British waters of the Bay of Fundy, 
but keeping all the morning so close to the New 
Brunswick shore that we could see there was 
nothing on it ; that is, nothing that would make 
one wish to land. And yet the best part of going 
to sea is keeping close to the shore, however tame 
it may be, if the weather is pleasant. A pretty 
bay now and then, a rocky cove with scant foli- 
age, a lighthouse, a rude cabin, a level land, mo- 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 35 

notonous and without noble forests, — this was 
New Brunswick as we coasted along it under the 
most favorable circumstances. But we were ad- 
vancing into the Bay of Fundy ; and my comrade, 
who had been brought up on its high tides in the 
district school, was on the lookout for this phe- 
nomenon. The very name of Fundy is stimu- 
lating to the imagination, amid the geographical 
wastes of youth, and the young fancy reaches out 
to its tides with an enthusiasm that is given only 
to Fingal's Cave and other pictorial wonders of the 
text-book. I am sure the district schools would 
become Avhat they are not now, if the geographers 
would make the other parts of the globe as at- 
tractive as the sonorous Bay of Fundy. The 
recitation about that is always an easy one; 
there is a lusty pleasure in the mere shouting out 
of the name, as if the speaking it were an inno- 
cent sort of swearing. From the Bay of Fundy 
the rivers run up hill half the time, and the tides 
are from forty to ninety feet high. For myself, I 
confess that, in my imagination, I used to see the 
tides of this bay go stalking into the land like 



36 BADDECK, 



gigantic water-spouts; or, when I was better 
instructed, I could see them advancing on the 
coast Hke a sohd wall of masonry eighty feet 
high. " Where," we said, as we came easily, and 
neither up hill nor down hill, into the pleasant 
harbor of St. John, — " where are the tides of 
our youth 1 " 

They were probably out, for when we came to 
the land we walked out upon the foot of a sloping 
platform that ran into the water by the side of 
the piles of the dock, which stood up naked and 
blackened high in the air. It is not the purpose 
of this paper to describe St. John, nor to dwell 
upon its picturesque situation. As one ap- 
proaches it from the harbor it gives a promise 
which its rather shabby streets, decaying houses, 
and steep plank sidewalks do not keep. A city 
set on a hill, with flags flying from a roof here 
and there, and a few shining spires and walls glis- 
tening in the sun, always looks well at a distance. 
St. John is extravagant in the matter of flag- 
staffs ; almost every well-to-do citizen seems to 
have one on his premises, as a sort of vent for his 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 37 

loyalty, I presume. It is a good fashion, at any 
rate, and its more general adoption by us would 
add to the ga3'ety of our cities when we celebrate 
the birthday of the President. St. John is built 
on a steep sidehill, from which it would be in 
danger of sliding off, if its houses were not mor- 
tised into the solid rock. This makes the house- 
foundations secure, but the labor of blasting out 
streets is considerable. We note these things 
complacently as we toil in the sun up the hill to 
the Victoria Hotel, which stands well up on the 
backbone of the ridge, and from the upper windows 
of which we have a fine view of the harbor, and of 
the hill opposite, above Carleton, where there is 
the brokenly truncated ruin of a round stone 
tower. This tower was one of the first things 
that caught our eyes as we entered the harbor. 
It gave an antique picturesqueness to the land- 
scape which it entirely wanted without this. 
Round stone towers are not so common in this 
world that we can afford to be indifferent to them. 
This is called a Martello tower, but I could not 
learn who built it. I could not understand the 



38 BADDECK, 



indifference, almost amounting to contempt, of 
the citizens of St. John in regard to this their 
only piece of curious antiquity. ''It is nothing 
but the ruins of an old fort," they said ; "you can 
see it as well from here as by going there." It 
"was, however, the one thing at St. John I was 
determined to see. But we never got any nearer 
to it than the ferry-landing. Want of time and 
the vis inertia of the jDlace were against us. And 
now, as I think of that tower and its perhaps 
mysterious origin, I have a longing for it that the 
possession of nothing else in the Provinces could 
satisfy. 

But it must not be forgotten that we were on 
our way to Baddeck ; that the whole purpose of 
the journey was to reach Baddeck ; that St. John 
was only an incident in the trip ; that any infor- 
mation about St. John, which is here thrown in or 
mercifully withheld, is entirely gratuitous, and is 
not taken into account in the price the reader 
pays for this volume. But if any one wants to 
know what sort of a place St. John is, we can tell 
him : it is the sort of a place that if you get into 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 39 

it after eight o'clock on Wednesday morning, you 
cannot get out of it in any direction until Thurs- 
day morning at eight o'clock, unless you want to 
smuggle goods on the night train to Bangor. It 
was eleven o'clock Wednesday forenoon when we 
arrived at St. John. The Inter-colonial railway 
train had gone to Shediac ; it had gone also on 
its roundabout Moncton, Missaquat River, Truro, 
Stewiack, and Shubenacadie way to Halifax ; the 
boat had gone to Digby Gut and Annapolis to 
catch the train that way for Halifax ; the boat 
had gone up the river to Frederick, the capital. 
We could go to none of these places till the next 
day. We had no desire to go to Frederick, but 
we made the fact that we were cut off from it an 
addition to our injury. The people of St. John 
have this peculiarity : they never start to go any- 
where except early in the morning. 

The reader to whom time is nothing does not 
yet appreciate the annoyance .of our situation. 
Our time was strictly limited. The active world 
is so constituted that it could not spare us more 
than two weeks. We must reach Baddeck Satur- 



40 BADDECK. 



day night or never. To go home without seeing 
Baddeck was simply intolerable. Had we not told 
everybody that we were going to Baddeck % Now, 
if we had gone to Shediac in the train that left 
St. John that morning, we should have taken the 
steamboat that would have carried us to Port 
Hawksbury, whence a stage connected with a 
steamboat on the Bras d'Or, which (with all this 
profusion of relative pronouns) would land us at 
Baddeck on Friday. How many times had we 
been over this route on the map and the prospec- 
tus of travel ! And now, what a delusion it 
seemed ! There would not another boat leave 
Shediac on this route till the following Tuesday, 
— quite too late for our purpose. The reader sees 
where we were, and will be prepared, if he has a 
map (and any feelings), to appreciate the masterly 
^ strategy that followed. 



II 




During the pilgrimage eveiything does not suit the tastes of 
the pilgrim, — Turkish Proverb. 

NE seeking Baddeck, as a possession, 
would not like to be detained a prisoner 
even in Eden, — much less in St. John, 
which is unlike Eden in several important respects. 
The tree of knowledge does not grow there, for 
one thing ; at least St. John's ignorance of Bad- 
deck amounts to a feature. This encountered us 
everywhere. So dense was this ignorance, that 
we, whose only knowledge of the desired place 
was obtained from the prospectus of travel, came 
to regard ourselves as missionaries of geogi'aphical 
information in this dark provincial city. 

The clerk at the Victoria was not unwilling to 
help us on our journey, but if he could have had 
his way, we would have gone to a place on Prince 



42 BADDECK, 



Edward Island, which used to be called Bedeque, 
but is now named Summerside, in the hope of at- 
tracting summer visitors. As to Cape Breton, he 
said the agent of the Inter-colonial could tell us 
all about that, and put us on the route. We re- 
paired to the agent. The kindness of this person 
dwells in our memory. He entered at once into 
our longings and perplexities. He produced his 
maps and time-tables, and showed us clearly what 
we already knew. The Port Hawksbury steam- 
boat from Shediac for that week had gone, to be 
sure, but we could take one of another line which 
would leave us at Pictou, whence we could take 
another across to Port Hood, on Cape Breton. 
This looked fair, until we showed the agent that 
there was no steamer to Port Hood. 

" Ah, then you can go another way. You can 
take the Inter-colonial railway round to Pictou, 
catch the steamer for Port Hawksbury, connect 
with the steamer on the Bras d'Or, and you are 
all right." 

So it would seem. It was a most obliging 
agent ; and it took us half an hour to convince 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 43 

him that the train would reach Pictou half a day 
too late for the steamer, that no other boat would 
leave Pictou for Cape Breton that week, and that 
even if we could reach the Bras d'Or we should 
have no means of crossing it, except by swimming. 
The perplexed agent thereupon referred us to Mr. 
Brown, a shipper on the wharf, who knew all 
about Cape Breton, and could tell us exactly how 
to get there. It is needless to say that a weight 
was taken off our minds. We pinned our faith to 
Brown, and sought him in his warehouse. Brown 
was a prompt business man, and a traveller, and 
would know every route and every conveyance 
from Nova Scotia to Cape Breton. 

Mr. Brown was not in. He never is in. His 
store is a rusty warehouse, low and musty, piled 
full of boxes of soap and candles and dried fish, 
with a little glass cubby in one corner, where a 
thin clerk sits at a high desk, like a spider in his 
web. Perhaps he is a spider, for the cubby is 
swarming with flies, whose hum is the only noise 
of traffic ; the glass of the window-sash has not 
been washed since it was put in, apparently. The 



44 BAD DECK, 



clerk is not writing, and has evidently no other 
use for his steel pen than spearing flies. Brown 
is out, says this young votary of commerce, and 
will not be in till half past five. We remark upon 
the fact that nobody ever is " in " these dingy 
warehouses, wonder when the business is done, 
and go out into the street to wait for Brown. 
In front of the store is a dray, its horse fast 
asleep, and waiting for the revival of commerce. 
The travellers note that the dray is of a peculiar 
construction, the body being dropped down from 
the axles so as nearly to touch the ground, — a 
great convenience in loading and unloading ; they 
propose to introduce it into their native land. 
The dray is probably waiting for the tide to come 
in. In the deep slip lie a dozen helpless vessels, 
coasting schooners mostly, tipped on their beam 
ends in the mud, or j^ropj^ed up by side-pieces as 
if they were built for land as well as for water. 
At the end of the wharf is a long English steam- 
boat unloading railroad iron, which will return to 
the Clyde full of Nova Scotia coal. We sit down 
on the dock, where the fresh sea-breeze comes up 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 45 

the harbor, watch the lazily swinging crane on the 
vessel, and meditate upon the greatness of Eng- 
land and the peacefulness of the drowsy afternoon. 
One's feeling of rest is never complete miless he 
can see somebody else at work, — but the labor 
must be without haste, as it is in the Provinces. 

While waiting for Brown, we had leisure to ex- 
plore the shops of King's Street, and to climb up 
to the grand triumphal arch which stands on top 
of the hill and guards the entrance to King's 
Square. Of the shops for dry-goods I have noth- 
ing to say, for they tempt the unwary American 
to violate the revenue laws of his country ; but he 
may safely go into the book-shops. The literature 
which is displayed in the windows and on the 
counters has lost that freshness which it once may 
have had, and is, in fact, if one must use the term, 
fly-specked, like the cakes in the grocery windows 
on the side streets. There are old illustrated 
newspapers from the States, cheap novels from 
the same, and the flashy covers of the London and 
Edinburgh sixpenny editions. But this is the dull 
season for literature, we reflect. 



46 BADDECK, 



It will always be matter of regret to us that 
we climbed up to the triumphal arch, wliich ap- 
peared so noble in the distance, with the trees 
behind it. For when we reached it, we found 
that it was built of wood, painted and sanded, and 
in a shocking state of decay; and the grove to 
which it admitted us was only a scant assemblage 
of sickly locust-trees, which seemed to be tired of 
battling with the unfavorable climate, and had, in 
fact, already retired from the business of orna- 
mental shade-trees. Adjoining this square is an 
ancient cemetery, the surface of which has decayed 
in sympathy with the mouldering remains it cov- 
ers, and is quite a model in this respect. I have 
called this cemetery ancient, but it may not be so, 
for its air of decay is thoroughly modern, and 
neglect, and not years, appears to have made it 
the melancholy place of repose it is. Whether it 
is the fashionable and favorite resort of the dead 
of the city we did not learn, but there were some 
old men sitting in its damp shades, and the nurses 
appeared to make it a rendezvous for their baby- 
carriages, — a cheerful place to bring up children 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 47 

in, and to familiarize their infant minds with the 
fleeting nature of provincial life. The park and 
burying-ground, it is scarcely necessary to say, 
added greatly to the feeling of repose which stole 
over us on this sunny day.' And they made us 
long for Brown and his information about Bad- 
deck. 

But Mr. Brown, when found, did not know as 
much as the agent. He had been in Nova Scotia; 
he had never been in Cape Breton ; but he pre- 
sumed we would find no difficulty in reaching 
Baddeck by so and so, and so and so. We con- 
sumed valuable time in convincing Brown that his 
directions to us were impracticable and valueless, 
and then he referred us to Mr. Cope. An inter- 
view with Mr. Cope discouraged us; we found 
that we were imparting everywhere more geo- 
graphical information than we were receiving, and 
as our own stock was small, we concluded that we 
should be unable to enlighten all the inhabitants 
of St. John upon the subject of Baddeck before we 
ran out. Returning to the hotel, and taking our 
destiny into our own hands, we resolved upon a 
bold stroke. 



48 BAD DECK, 



But to return for a moment to Brown. I feel 
that Brown has been let off too easily in the above 
paragraph. His conduct, to say the truth, was 
not such as we expected of a man in whom we 
had put our entire faith for half a day, — a long 
while to trust anybody in these times, — a man 
whom we had exalted as an encyclopaidia of informa- 
tion, and idealized in every way. A man of wealth 
and liberal views and courtly manners we had de- 
cided Brown would be. Perhaps he had a suburb- 
an villa on the heights overlooking Kennebeckasis 
Bay, and, recognizing us as brothers in a common 
interest in Baddeck, notwithstanding our different 
nationality, would insist upon taking us to his 
house, to si]) provincial tea with Mrs. Brown and 
Victoria Louise, his daughter. When, therefore, 
Mr. Brown whisked into his dingy office, and, but 
for our importunity, would have paid no more at- 
tention to us than to up-country customers without 
credit, and when he proved to be willingly, it 
seemed to us, ignorant of Baddeck, our feelings 
received a great shock. It is incomprehensible 
that a man in the position of Brown — with so 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 49 

many boxes of soap and candles to dispose of — 
should be so ignorant of a neighboring province. 
AVe had heard of the cordial unity of the provinces 
in the New Dominion. Heaven help it, if it de- 
pends upon such fellows as Brown ! Of course, 
his directing us to Cope was a mere fetch. For, 
as we have intimated, it would have taken us 
longer to have given Cope an idea of Baddeck, than 
it did to enlighten Brown. But we had no bitter 
feelings about Cope, for we never had reposed con- 
fidence in him. 

Our plan of campaign was briefly this : To take 
the steamboat at eight o'clock, Thursday morning, 
for Digby Gut and Annapolis; thence to go by 
rail through the poetical Acadia down to Halifax ; 
to turn north and east by rail from Halifax to New 
Glasgow, and from thence to push on by stage to 
the Gut of Canso. This would carry us over the 
entire length of Nova Scotia, and, with good luck, 
land us on Cape Breton Island Saturday morning. 
When we should set foot on that island, we trusted 
that we should be able to make our way to Bad- 
deck, by walking, swimming, or riding, whichever 



50 BADDECK, 



sort of locomotion should be most popular in that 
province. Our imaginations were kindled by read- 
ing that the "most superb line of stages on the 
continent " ran fi'om New Glasgow to the Gut of 
Canso. If the reader perfectly understands this 
programme, he has the advantage of the two trav- 
ellers at the time they made it. 

It was a gTay morning when we embarked from 
St. John, and in fact a little drizzle of rain veiled 
the Martello tower, and checked, like the cross- 
strokes of a line engraving, the-.'^hill on which it 
stands. The miscellaneous shipping of such a 
harbor appears best in a golden haze, or in the 
mist of a morning like this. We had expected 
days of fog in this region ; but the fog seemed to 
have gone out with the high tides of the geography. 
And it is simple justice to these possessions of her 
Majesty, to say that in our two weeks' acquaintance 
of them they enjoyed as delicious weather as ever 
falls on sea and shore, with the exception of this 
day when we crossed the Bay of Fundy. And this 
day was only one of those cool interludes of low 
color, which an artist would be thankful to intro- 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 51 

duce among a group of brilliant pictures. Such a 
day rests the traveller, who is over-stimulated by 
shifting scenes played upon by the dazzling sun. 
So the cool gray clouds spread a grateful umbrella 
above us as we ran across the Bay of Fundy, 
sighted the headlands of the Gut of Digby, and 
entered into the Annapolis Basin, and into the 
region of a romantic history. The w^hite houses 
of Digby, scattered over the downs like a flock of 
washed sheep, had a somewhat chilly aspect, it is 
true, and made us long for the sun on them. But 
as I think of it now, I prefer to have the town 
and the pretty hillsides that stand about the basin 
in the light w^e saw them ; and especially do I like 
to recall the high wooden pier at Digby, deserted 
by the tide and so blown by the wdnd that the pas- 
sengers who came out on it, with their tossing 
drapery, brought to mind the windy Dutch har- 
bors that Backhiiysen painted. We landed a 
priest here, and it was a pleasure to see him as*he 
walked along the high pier, his broad hat flapping, 
and the wind blowing his long skirts away from 
his ecclesiastical lesrs. 



52 BADDECK, 



It was one of the coincidences of life, for which 
no one can account, that when we descended upon 
these coasts, the Governor-General of the Dominion 
was abroad in his Provinces. There was an air of 
expectation of him everywhere, and of preparation 
for his coming; his lordship was the subject of 
conversation on the Digby boat, his movements 
were chronicled in the newspapers, and the gracious 
bearing of the Governor and Lady Dufferin at the 
civic receptions, balls, and picnics was recorded 
with loyal satisfacton ; even a literary flavor was 
given to the provincial journals by quotations from 
his lordship's condescension to letters in the " High 
Latitudes." It was not without pain, however, 
that even in this un-American region we discovered 
the old Adam of jouraalism in the disposition of 
the newspapers of St. John toward sarcasm touch- 
ing the well-meant attempts to entertain the Gov- 
ernor and his lady in the provincial town of 
Halifax, — a disposition to turn, in short, upon the 
demonstrations of loyal worship the faint light of 
ridicule. There were those upon the boat who 
were journeying to Halifax to take part in the civic 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 53 

ball about to be given to their excellencies, and as 
we were going in the same direction, we shared in 
the feeling of satisfaction which proximity to the 
Great often excites. 

We had other if not deeper causes of satisfaction. 
We were sailing along the gracefully moulded and 
tree-covered hills of the Annapolis Basin, and up 
the mildly picturesque river of that name, and we 
were about to enter what the provincials all en- 
thusiastically call the Garden of Nova Scotia. 
This favored vale, skirted by low ranges of hills 
on either hand, and watered most of the way by 
the Annapolis River, extends from the mouth of the 
latter to the town of Windsor on the river Avon. 
We expected to see something like the fertile 
valleys of the Connecticut or the Mohawk. We 
should also pass through those meadows on the 
Basin of Minas, which Mr. Longfellow has made 
more sadly poetical than any other spot on the 
Western Continent. It is, — this valley of the 
Annapolis, — in the belief of provincials, the most 
beautiful and blooming place in the world, with a 
soil and climate kind to the husbandman, a land 



54 BADDECK, 



of fair meadows, orchards, and vines. It was 
doubtless our own fault that this land did not look 
to us like a garden, as it does to the inhabitants 
of Nova Scotia ; and it was not until we had trav- 
elled over the rest of the country, that we saw the 
appropriateness of the designation. The explana- 
tion is, that not so much is required of a garden 
here as in some other parts of the world. Excel- 
lent apples, none finer, are exported from this val- 
ley to England, and the quality of the potatoes 
is said to approach an ideal perfection here. I 
should think that oats would ripen well also in a 
good year, and grass, for those who care for it, may 
be satisfactory. I should judge that the other 
products of this garden are fish and building-stone. 
But wx anticipate. And have we forgotten the 
" murmuring pines and the hemlocks " 1 Nobody, 
I suppose, ever travels here without believing that 
he sees these trees of the imagination, so forcibly 
has the poet projected them upon the universal 
consciousness. But we were unable to see them, 
on this route. 

It would be a brutal thing for us to take seats 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 55 

in the railway train at Annapolis, and leave the 
ancient town, with its modern houses and remains, 
of old fortifications, without a thought of the ro- 
mantic history which saturates the region. There 
is not much in the smart, new restaurant, where a 
tidy waiting-maid skilfully depreciates our curren- 
cy in exchange for bread and cheese and ale, to 
recall the early drama of the French discovery and 
settlement. For it is to the French that we owe 
the poetical interest that still invests, like a gar- 
ment, all these islands and bays, just as it is to 
the Spaniards that we owe the romance of the 
Florida coast. Every spot on this continent that 
either of these races has touched has a color that 
is wanting in the prosaic settlements of the Eng- 
lish. Without the historical light of French ad- 
venture upon this town and basin of Annapolis, or 
Port Eoyal, as they were first named, I confess 
that I should have no longing to stay here for a 
week ; notwithstanding the guide-book distinctly 
says that this harbor has "a striking resemblance 
to the beautiful Bay of Naples." I am not offended 
at this remark, for it is the one always made about 



56 BADDECK, 



a harbor, and I am sure the passing traveller can 
stand it, if the Bay of Naples can. And yet this 
tranquil basin must have seemed a haven of peace 
to the first discoverers. 

It was on a lovely summer day in 1604, that 
the Sieur de Monts and his comrades, Champlain 
and the Baron de Poutrincourt, beating about the 
shores of Nova Scotia, were invited by the rocky 
gateway of the Port Royal Basin. They entered 
the small inlet, says Mr. Parkman, when suddenly 
the narrow strait dilated into a broad and tran- 
quil basin, compassed with sunny hills, wrapped 
with woodland verdure and alive with waterfalls. 
Poutrincourt was delighted with the scene, and 
would fain remove thither from France with his 
family. Since Poutrincourt' s day, the hills have 
been somewhat denuded of trees, and the water- 
falls are not now in sight ; at least, not under such 
a gray sky as we saw. 

The reader who once begins to look into the 
French occupancy of Acadia is in danger of get- 
ting into a sentimental vein, and sentiment is the 
one thing to be shunned in these days. Yet I 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 57 

cannot but stay, though the train should leave us, to 
pay my respectful homage to one of the most heroic 
of women, whose name recalls the most romantic 
incident in the history of this region. Out of this 
past there rises no figure so captivating to the 
imagination as that of Madame de la Tour. And 
it is noticeable that woman has a curious habit of 
coming to the front in critical moments of history, 
and performing some exploit that eclipses in brill- 
iancy all the deeds of contemporary men ; and the 
exploit usually ends in a pathetic tragedy, that 
fixes it forever in the sympathy of the world. I 
need not copy out of the pages of De Charlevoix 
the well-known story of Madame de la Tour; I 
only wish he had told us more about her. It is 
here at Port Royal that we first see her with her 
husband. Charles de St. Etienne, the Chevalier 
de la Tour, — there is a world of romance in these 
mere names, — was a Huguenot nobleman who 
had a grant of Port Royal and of La Heve, from 
Louis XIIL He ceded La Heve to Razilli, t^e 
governor-in-chief of the provinces, who took a fancy 
to it, for a residence. He was living peacefully at 



58 BADDECK, 



Port Royal in 1647, when the Chevalier d'Aunay 
Charnise, having succeeded his brother Razilli at 
La Heve, tired of that place, and removed to Port 
Roj^al. De Charnise was a Catholic ; the difference 
in religion might not have produced any unpleas- 
antness, but the two noblemen could not agree in 
dividing the profits of the peltry trade, — each 
being covetous, ifVe may so express it, of the hide 
of the savage continent, and determined to take it 
off for himself. At any rate, disagreement arose, 
and De la Tour moved over to the St. John, of 
which region his father had enjoyed a grant from 
Charles I. of England, — whose sad fate it is not 
necessary now to recall to the reader's mind, — 
and built a fort at the mouth of the river. But the 
differences of the two ambitious Frenchmen could 
not be composed. De la Tour obtained aid from 
Governor Winthrop at Boston, thus verifying the 
Catholic prediction that the Huguenots would side 
with the enemies of France on occasion. De Char- 
nise received orders from Louis to arrest De la 
Tour ; but a little preliminary to the arrest was 
the possession of the fort of St. John, and this he 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 59 

could not obtain, although he sent all his force 
against it. Taking advantage, however, of the 
absence of De la Tour, who had a habit of roving 
about, he one day besieged St. John. Madame de 
la Tour headed the little handful of men in the 
fort, and made such a gallant resistance that De 
Charnise was obliged to draw off his fleet with the 
loss of thirty-three men, — a very serious loss, 
when the supply of men was as distant as France. 
But De Charnise would not be balked by a 
woman ; he attacked again ; and this time, one 
of the garrison, a Swiss, betrayed the fort, and let 
the invaders into the walls by an unguarded en- 
trance. It was Easter morning when this misfor- 
tune occurred, but the peaceful influence of the 
day did not avail. When Madame saw that she 
was betrayed, her spirits did not quail ; she took 
refuge with her little band in a detached part of 
the fort, and there made such a bold show of de- 
fence, that De Charnise was obliged to agree to 
the terms of her surrender, which she dictated. 
No sooner had this unchivalrous fellow obtained 
possession of the fort and of this Historic Woman, 



60 BADDECK, 



than, overcome with a false shame that he had 
made terms with a woman, he violated his noble 
word, and condemned to death all the men, except 
one, who was spared on condition that he should 
be the executioner of the others. And the pol- 
troon compelled the brave woman to witness the 
execution, with the added indignity of a rope round 
her neck, — or as De Charlevoix much more neatly 
expresses it, " obligea sa prisonniere cV assister a 
I'execution, la corde au cou." 

To the shock of this horror the womanly spirit 
of Madame de la Tour succumbed ; she fell into 
a decline and died soon after. De la Tour, him- 
self an exile from his province, wandered about 
the New World in his customary pursuit of pel- 
try. He was seen at Quebec for two years. While 
there, he heard of the death of De Charnise, and 
straightway repaired to St. John. The widow of his 
late enemy received him graciously, and he entered 
into possession of the estate of the late occupant 
with the consent of all the heirs. To remove all 
roots of bitterness, De la Tour married Madame 
de Charnis6, and history does not record any ill of 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 61 

either of them. I trust they had the grace to 
plant a sweetbrier on the grave of the noble 
woman to whose faithfulness and courage they owe 
their rescue from obscurity. At least the parties 
to this singular union must have agreed to ignore 
the lamented existence of the Chevalier d'Aunay. 

With the Chevalier de la Tour, at any rate, it 
all went well thereafter. When Cromwell drove 
the French from Acadia, he granted great terri- 
torial rights to De la Tour, which that thrifty 
adventurer sold out to one of his co-grantees for 
£16,000; and he no doubt invested the money 
in peltry for the London market. 

As we leave the station at Annapolis, we are 
obliged to put Madame de la Tour out of our 
minds to make room for another woman whose 
name, and we might say presence, fills all the valley 
before us. So it is that woman continues to reign, 
where she has once got a foothold, long after her 
dear frame has become dust. Evangeline, who is 
as real a personage as Queen Esther, must have 
been a different woman from Madame de la Tour. 
If the latter had lived at Grand Pre, she would, I 



62 BAD DECK, 

trust, have made it hot for the brutal English who 
drove the Acadians out of their salt-marsh para- 
dise, and have died in her heroic shoes rather than 
float off into poetiy. But if it should come to the 
question of marrying the De la Tour or the Evan- 
geline, I think no man who was not engaged in 
the peltry trade would hesitate w4iich to choose. 
At any rate, the women who love have more in- 
fluence in the world than the women who fight, 
and so it happens that the sentimental traveller 
who passes through Port Royal without a tear for 
Madame de la Tour, begins to be in a glow of ten- 
der longing and regret for Evangeline as soon as 
he enters the valley of the Annapolis River. For 
myself, I expected to see written over the railway 
crossings the legend, — 

**3Looit out for lEfaanpIine iofjih t!je ?3ell rtttffs.'* 

AVhen one rides into a region of romance he 
does not much notice his speed or his carnage ; 
but I am obliged to say that we were not hurried 
up the valley, and that the cars were not too 
luxurious for the plain people, priests, clergymen, 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 63 

and belles of the region, who rode in them. Evi- 
dently the latest fashions had not arrived in the 
Provinces, and we had an opportunity of studying 
anew those that had long passed away in the 
States, and of remarking how inappropriate a fash- 
ion is when it has ceased to be the fashion. 

The river becomes small shortly after we leave 
Annapolis and before we reach Paradise. At this 
station of happy appellation we looked for the 
satirist who named it, but he has probably sold 
out and removed. If the effect of wit is produced 
by the sudden recognition of a remote resemblance, 
there was nothing witty in the naming of this 
station. Indeed, we looked in vain for the " gar- 
den " appearance of the valley. There was noth- 
ing generous in the small meadows or the thin 
orchards; and if large trees ever grew on the 
bordering hills, they have given place to rather 
stunted evergreens ; the scraggy firs and balsams, 
in fact, possess Nova Scotia generally as we saw it, 
— and there is nothing more uninteresting and 
wearisome than large tracts of these woods. We 
are bound to believe that Nova Scotia has some- 



64 BADDECK, 



where, or had, great pines and hemlocks that mur- 
mur, but we were not blessed with the sight of 
them. Slightly picturesque this valley is with its 
winding river and high hills guarding it, and per- 
haps a person would enjoy a foot-tramp down it ; 
but I think he would find little peculiar or inter- 
esting after he left the neighborhood of the Basin 
of Minas. 

Before we reached Wolfville we came in sight of 
this basin and some of the estuaries and streams 
that run into it ; that is, when the tide goes out ; 
but they are only muddy ditches half the time. 
The Acadia College was pointed out to us at Wolf- 
ville by a person who said that it is a feeble in- 
stitution, a remark we were sorry to hear of a place 
described as " one of the foremost seats of learning 
in the Province." But our regret was at once 
extinguished by the announcement that the next 
station was Grand Pre! We were within three 
miles of the most poetic place in North America. 

There was on the train a young man from Bos- 
ton, who said that he was born in Grand Pre. It 
seemed impossible that we should actually be near 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. Q6 

a person so felicitously born. He had a justifiable 
pride in the fact, as well as in the bride by his 
side, whom he was taking to see for the first time 
his old home. His local information, imparted to 
her, overflowed upon us ; and when he found that 
we had read " Evangeline," his delight in making 
us acquainted with the scene of that poem was 
pleasant to see. The village of Grand Pre is a mile 
from the station ; and perhaps the reader would 
like to know exactly what the traveller, hastening 
on to Baddeck, can see of the famous locality. 

We looked over a well-grassed meadow, seamed 
here and there by beds of streams left bare by the 
receding tide, to a gentle swell in the ground upon 
which is a not heavy forest growth. The trees 
partly conceal the street of Grand Pr^, which is 
only a road bordered by common houses. Beyond 
is the Basin of Minas, with its sedgy shore, its 
dreary flats; and beyond that projects a bold 
headland, standing perpendicular against the sky. 
This is the Cape Blomedon, and it gives a certain 
dignity to the picture. 

The old Normandy picturesqueness has departed 



66 BAD DECK, 

from the village of Grand Pre. Yankee settlers, 
we were told, possess it now, and there are no de- 
scendants of the French Acadians in this valley. 
I believe that Mr. Cozzens found some of them in 
humble circumstances in a village on the other 
coast, not far from Halifax, and it is there, proba- 
bly, that the 

"Maidens still wear their Norman caps and their kirtles of 
homespun, 
And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline's story, — 
While from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced, neighboring 

ocean 
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the 
forest." 
At any rate, there is nothing here now except a 
faint tradition of the French Acadians; and the 
sentimental traveller who laments that they were 
driven out, and not left behind their dikes to rear 
their flocks, and cultivate the rural virtues, and 
live in the simplicity of ignorance, will temper his 
sadness by the reflection that it is to the expul- 
sion he owes " Evangeline " and the luxury of his 
romantic grief So that if the traveller is honest, 
and examines his own soul faithfully, he will not 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 67 

know what state of mind to cherish as he passes 
through this region of sorrow. 

Our eyes Hngered as long as possible and with 
all eagerness upon these meadows and marshes 
which the poet has made immortal, and we regret- 
ted that inexorable Baddeck would not permit us 
to be pilgrims for a day in this Acadian land. 
Just as I was losmg sight of the skirt of trees at 
Grand Pre, a gentleman in the dress of a rural 
clergyman left his seat, and complimented me with 
this remark : " I perceive, sir, that you are fond 
of reading." 

I could not but feel flattered by this unexpected 
discovery of my nature, which was no doubt due 
to the fact that I held in my hand one of the works 
of Charles Reade on social science, called " Love 
me Little, Love me Long," and I said, " Of some 
kinds, I am." 

" Did you ever see a work called 'Evangeline ' 1 " 
" 0, yes, I have frequently seen it." 
"You may remember," continued this Mass of 
Liformation, "that there is an allusion in it to 
Grand Pre. That is the place, sir ! " 



68 BADDECK, 



"0, indeed, is that the place? Thank you." 

" And that mountain yonder is Cape Blomedon, 
— blow me down, you know." 

And under cover of this pun, the amiable clergy- 
man retired, unconscious, I presume, of his prosaic 
effect upon the atmosphere of the region. With 
this intrusion of the commonplace, I suffered an 
eclipse of faith as to Evangeline, and was not sony 
to have my attention taken up by the river Avon, 
along the banks of which we were running about 
this time. It is really a broad arm of the basin, 
extending up to Windsor, and beyond in a small 
stream, and would have been a charming river if 
there had been a drop of water in it. I never 
knew before how much water adds to a river. Its 
slimy bottom was quite a ghastly spectacle, an 
ugly gash in the land that nothing could heal but 
the friendly returning tide. I should think it 
would be confusing to dwell by a river that runs 
first one way and then the other, and then van- 
ishes altogether. 

All the streams about this basin are famous for 
their salmon and shad, and the season for these 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 69 

fish was not yet passed. There seems to be an 
untraced affinity between the shad and the straw- 
berry ; they appear and disappear in a region si- 
multaneously. When we reached Cape Breton, we 
were a day or two late for both. It is impossible 
not to feel a little contempt for people who do not 
have these luxuries till July and August ; but I 
suppose we are in turn despised by the Southern- 
ers because we do not have them till May and 
June. So, a great part of the enjoyment of life 
is in the knowledge that there are people living in 
a worse place than that you inhabit. 

Windsor, a most respectable old town round 
which the railroad sweeps, with its iron bridge, 
conspicuous King's College, and handsome church 
spire, is a great place for plaster and limestone, 
and would be a good location for a person interest- 
ed in these substances. Indeed, if a man can live 
on rocks, like a goat, he may settle anywhere 
between Windsor and Halifax. It is one of the 
most sterile regions in the Province. With the 
exception of a wild pond or two, we saw nothing 
but rocks and stunted firs, for forty-five miles, a 



70 BADDECK, 



monotony unrelieved by one picturesque feature. 
Then we longed for the " Garden of Nova Scotia," 
and understood wh'at is meant by the name. 

A member of the Ottawa government, who was 
on his way to the Governor-General's ball at Hali- 
fax, informed us that this countr}^ is rich in min- 
erals, in iron especially, and he pointed out spots 
where gold had been washed out. But we do not 
covet it. And we were not soiTy to learn from 
this gentleman, that since the formation of the 
Dominion, there is less and less desire in the Prov- 
inces for annexation to the United States. One 
of the chief pleasures in travelling in Nova Scotia 
now is in the constant reflection that you are in a 
foreign country ; and annexation would take that 
away. 

It is nearly dark when we reach the head of 
the Bedford Basin. The noble harbor of Halifax 
narrows to a deep inlet for three miles along the 
rocky slope on which the city stands, and then 
suddenly expands into this beautiful sheet of 
water. We ran along its bank for five miles, 
cheered occasionally by a twinkling light on the 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 71 

bliore, and then came to a stop at the shabby ter- 
minus, three miles out of town. This basin is 
almost large enough to float the navy of Great 
Britain, and it could lie here, with the narrows 
fortified, secure from the attacks of the American 
navy, hovering outside in the fog. With these 
patriotic thoughts we enter the town. It is not 
the fault of the railroad, but its present inability 
to climb a rocky hill, that it does not run into the 
city. The suburbs are not impressive in the 
night, but they look better then than they do in 
the daytime ; and the same might be said of the 
city itself. Probably there is not anywhere a 
more rusty, forlorn town, and this in spite of its 
magnificent situation. 

It is a gala-night when we rattle down the 
rough streets, and have pointed out to us the 
sombre government buildings. The Halifax Club 
House is a blaze of light, for the Governor-General 
is being received there, and workmen are still 
busy decorating the Provincial Building for the 
great ball. The city is indeed pervaded by his 
lordship, and we regret that we cannot see it in 



72 BADDECK, 



its normal condition of quiet ; the hotels are full, 
and it is impossible to escape the festive feeling 
that is abroad. It ill accords with our desires, 
as tranquil travellers, to be plunged into such a 
vortex of slow dissipation. These people take 
their pleasures more gravely than we do, and 
probably will last the longer for their moderation. 
Having ascertained that we can get no more infor- 
mation about Baddeck here than in St. John, we 
go to bed early, for w^e are to depart from this 
fascinating place at six o'clock. 

If any one objects that we are not competent 
to pass judgment on the city of Halifax by sleeping 
there one night, I beg leave to plead the usual 
custom of travellers, — where would be our books 
of travel if more was expected than a night in a 
place 1 — and to state a few facts. The first is, 
that I saw the whole of Halifax. If I were in- 
clined, I could describe it building by building 
Cannot one see it all from the citadel hill, and by 
walking down by the horticultural garden and the 
Roman Catholic cemetery 1 and did not I climb 
that hill through the most dilapidated rows of 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 73 

brown houses, and stand on the greensward of the 
fortress at five o'clock in the morning, and see 
the whole city, and the British navy riding at 
anchor, and the fog coming in from the Atlantic 
Ocean ] Let the reader go to ! and if he would 
know more of Halifax, go there. We felt that if 
we remained there through the day, it would be 
a day of idleness and sadness. I could draw a 
picture of Halifax. I could relate its century 
of history ; I could write about its free-school 
system, and its many noble charities. But the 
reader always skips such things. He hates infor- 
mation; and he himself would not stay in this 
dull garrison town any longer than he was 
obliged to. 

There was to be a military display that day in 
honor of the Governor. 

"Why," I asked the bright and light-minded 
colored boy who sold papers on the morning train, 
"don't you stay in the city and see if?" 

"Pho," said he, with contempt, "I'm sick of 
'em. Halifax is played out, and I'm going to 
quit it." 



74 BADDECK, 



The withdrawal of this lively trader will be a 
blow to the enterprise of the place. 

When I returned to the hotel for breakfast — 
which was exactly like the supper, and consisted 
mainly of green tea and dry toast — there was 
a commotion among the waiters and the hack- 
drivers over a nervous little old man, who was in 
haste to depart for the morning train. He was a 
specimen of provincial antiquity such as could not 
be seen elsewhere. His costume was of the odd- 
est : a long-waisted coat reaching nearly to his 
heels, short trousers, a flowered silk vest, and a 
napless hat. He carried his baggage tied up in 
meal-bags, and his attention was divided between 
that and two buxom daughters, who were evi- 
dently enjoying their first taste of city life. The 
little old man, who was not unlike a petrified 
Frenchman of the last century, had risen before 
daylight, roused up his daughters, and had them 
down on the sidewalk by four o 'clock, waiting for 
hack, or horse-car, or something to take them to 
the station. That he might be a man of some 
importance at home was evident, but he had lost 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 75 

his head in the bustle of this great town, and was 
at the mercy of all advisers, none of whom could 
understand his mongrel language. As we came 
out to take the horse-car, he saw his helpless 
daughters driven off in one hack, while he was 
raving among his meal-bags on the sidewalk. Af- 
terwards we saw him at the station, flying about 
in the greatest excitement, asking everybody 
about the train ; and at last he foand his way 
into the priA^ate office of the ticket-seller. " Get 
oat of here," roared that official. The old man 
persisted that he wanted a ticket. ''Go round to 
the window, clear out ! " In a very flustered state 
he was hustled out of the room. When he came 
to the window and made known his destination, 
he was refused tickets, because his train did not 
start for two hours yet ! 

This mercurial old gentleman only appears in 
these records because he was the only person we 
saw in this Province who was in a huiTy to do 
anything, or to go anywhere. 

We cannot leave Halifax without remarking 
that it is a city of groat private virtue, and that 



76 BADDECK, 



its banks are sound. The appearance of its paper- 
money is not, however, inviting. We of the 
United States lead the world in beautiful paper- 
money ; and when I exchanged my crisp, hand- 
some greenbacks for the dirty, flimsy, ill-executed 
notes of the Dominion, at a dead loss of value, I 
could not be reconciled to the transaction. I sar- 
castically called the stuff 1 received ^' Confederate 
money " ; but probably no one was wounded by 
the severity ; for perhaps no one knew what a re- 
semblance in badness there is between the " Con- 
federate " notes of our civil war and the notes of 
the Dominion ; and, besides, the Confederacy was 
too popular in the Provinces for the name to be a 
reproach to them. I wish I had thought of some- 
thing more insulting to say. 

By noon on Friday we came to New Glasgow, 
having passed through a country where wealth is 
to be won by hard digging if it is won at all ; 
through Truro, at the head of the Cobequid Bay, 
a place exhibiting more thrift than any we have 
seen. A pleasant enough country, on the whole, 
is this which the road runs through up the Sal- 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 77 

mon and down the East River. New Glasgow is 
not many miles from Pictou, on the great Cum- 
berland Strait ; the inhabitants build vessels, and 
strangers drive out from here to see the neighbor- 
ing coal mines. Here we were to dine and take 
the stage for a ride of eighty miles to the Gut of 
Canso. 

The hotel at New Glasgow we can commend as 
one of the most miwliolesome in the Province ; 
but it is unnecessary to emphasize its condition, 
for if the traveller is in search of dirty hotels, he 
will scarcely go amiss anywhere in these regions. 
There seems to be a fashion in diet which endures. 
The early travellers as well as the later in these 
Atlantic provinces all note the prevalence of dry, 
limp toast and green tea ; they are the staples of 
all the meals ; though authorities differ in regard 
to the third element for discourag-ino; huno-er : it 
is sometimes boiled salt-fish and sometimes it is 
ham. Toast was probably an inspiration of the 
first woman of this part of the New World, who 
served it hot ; but it has become now a tradition 
blindly followed, witliout regard to temperature ; 



78 BADDECK, 



and the custom speaks volumes for the non-in- 
ventiveness of woman. At the inn in New Glas- 
gow those who choose dine in their shirt-sleeves, 
and those skilled in the ways of this table get all 
they want in seven minutes. A man who under- 
stands the use of edged tools can get along twice 
as fast with a knife and fork as he can with a fork 
alone. 

But the stage is at the door ; the coach and four 
horses answer the advertisement of being " second 
to none on the continent." We mount to the seat 
with the driver. The sun is bright ; the wind is 
in the southwest ; the leaders are impatient to go ; 
the start for the long ride is propitious. 

But on the back seat in the coach is the inevi- 
table woman, young and sickly, with the baby in 
her arms. The woman has paid her fare through 
to Guysborough, and holds her ticket. It turns 
out, however, that she wants to go to the district 
of Guysborough, to St. Mary's Cross Roads, some- 
where in it, and not to the village of Guysborough, 
which is away down on Chedabucto Bay. (The 
reader will notice this geographical familiarity.) 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 79 

And this stage does not go in the direction of St. 
Mary's. She will not get out, she will not surren- 
der her ticket, nor pay her fare again. Why 
should she % And the stage proprietor, the stage- 
driver, and the hostler mull over the problem, 
and sit down on the woman's hair-trunk in front 
of the tavern to reason with her. The baby joins 
its voice from the coach- window in the clamor of 

a 

the discussion. The baby prevails. The stage 
company comes to a compromise, the woman dis- 
mounts, and we are off, away from the white 
houses, over the sandy road, out upon a hilly and 
not cheerful country. And the driver begins to 
tell us stories of winter hardships, drifted high- 
ways, a land buried in snow, and great peril to men 
and cattle. 




III. 



" It was then summer, and the weather very fine ; so pleased 
was I with the country, in which I had never travelled before, 
that my delight proved equal to my wonder." — Benvenuto 
Cellini, 




HERE are few pleasures in life equal to 
that of ridinsr on the box-seat of a stage- 



coach, through a country unknown to 
you, and hearing the driver talk about his horses. 
We made the intimate acquaintance of twelve 
horses on that day's ride, and learned the peculiar 
disposition and traits of each one of them, their 
ambition of display, their sensitiveness to praise 
or blame, their faithfulness, their playfulness, the 
readiness with which they yielded to kind treat- 
ment, their daintiness about food and lodging. 

May I never forget the spirited little jade, the 
ofF-leader in the third stage, the petted belle of 
the route, the nervous, coquettish, mincing mare 



BAD DECK, AND THAT SORT OF THING. 81 

of Marshy Hope. A spoiled beauty she was ; you 
could see tliat as she took the road with dancing 
step, tossing her pretty head about, and conscious 
of her shining black coat and her tail done up "in 
any simple knot," — like the back hair of Shelley's 
Beatrice Cenci. How she ambled and sidled and 
plumed herself, and now and then let fly her little 
heels high in air in mere excess of larkish feeling. 

" So ! girl ; so ! Kitty," murmurs the driver in 
the softest tones of admiration; "she don't mean 
anything by it, she 's just like a kitten." 

But the heels keep flying above the traces, and 
by and by the driver is obliged to "speak hash" 
to the beauty. The reproof of the displeased tone 
is evidently felt, for she settles at once to her work, 
showing perhaps a little impatience, jerking her 
head up and down, and protesting by her nimble 
movements against the more deliberate trot of her 
companion. I believe that a blow from the cruel 
lash would have broken her heart ; or else it would 
have made a little fiend of the spirited creature. 
The lash is hardly ever good for tlie sex. 

For thirteen years, winter and summer, this 
4* F 



82 BADDECK, 

coachman had driven this monotonous, uninterest' 
ing route, with always the same sandy hills, scrub- 
by firs, occasional cabins, in sight. What a time 
to nurse his thought and feed on his heart ! How 
deliberately he can turn things over in his brain ! 
What a system of philosophy he might evolve out 
of his consciousness ! One would think so. But, 
in fact, the stage-box is no place for thinking. To 
handle twelve horses every day, to keep each to its 
proper work, stimulating the lazy and restraining 
the free, humoring each disposition, so that the 
greatest amount of work shall be obtained with the 
least friction, making each trip on time, and so as 
to leave each horse in as good condition at the 
close as at the start, taking advantage of the road, 
refreshing the team by an occasional spurt of 
speed, — all these things require constant atten- 
tion ; and if the driver was composing an epic, the 
coach might go into the ditch, or, if no accident 
happened, the horses would be worn out in a 
month, except for the driver's care. 

I conclude that the most delicate and important 
occupation in life is stage-driving. It would be 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 83 

easier to "run" the Treasury Department of the 
United States than a four-in-hand. I have a sense 
of the unimportance of everything else in compari- 
son with this business in hand. And I think the 
driver shares that feeling. He is the autocrat of 
the situation. He is lord of all the humble pas- 
sengers, and they feel their inferiority. They may 
have knowledge and skill in some things, but they 
are of no use here. At all the stables the driver 
is king ; all the people on the route are deferential 
to him; they are happy if he will crack a joke 
with them, and take it as a favor if he gives them 
better than they send. And it is his joke that 
always raises the laugh, regardless of its quality. 

We carry the royal mail, and as we go along 
drop little sealed canvas bags at way offices. The 
bags would not hold more than three pints of meal, 
and I can see that there is nothing in them. Yet 
somebody along here must be expecting a letter, 
or they would not keep up the mail facilities. At 
French River we change horses. There is a mill 
here, and there are half a dozen houses, and a 
cranky bridge, which the driver thinks will not 



84 BADDECK, 



tumble down this trip. The settlement may have 
seen better days, and will probably see worse. 

I preferred to cross the long shaky wooden bridge 
on foot, leaving the inside passengers to take the 
risk, and get the worth of their money ; and while 
the horses were being put to, I walked on over the 
hill. And here I encountered a veritable foot-pad, 
with a club in his hand and a bundle on his shoul- 
der, coming down the dusty road, with the wild- 
eyed aspect of one who travels into a far country 
in search of adventure. He seemed to be of a 
cheerful and sociable turn, and desired that I 
should linger and converse with him. But he was 
more meagrely supplied with the media of conver- 
sation than any person I ever met. His opening 
address was in a tongue that failed to convey to 
me the least idea. I replied in such language as 
I had with me, but it seemed to be equally lost 
upon him. We then fell back upon gestures and 
ejaculations, and by these I learned that he was a 
native of Cape Breton, but not an aborigine. By 
signs he asked me where I came from, and where 
I was going ; and he was so much pleased with my 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 85 

destination, that he desired to know my name ; 
and this I told him with all the injunction of 
secrecy I could convey ; but he could no more 
pronounce it than I could speak his name. It 
occurred to me that perhaps he spoke a French 
patois, and I asked him ; but he only shook his 
head. He would own neither to German nor Irish. 
The happy thought came to me of inquiring if he 
knew English. . But he shook his head again, and 
said, — 

" No English, plenty garlic." 

This was entirely incomprehensible, for I knew 
that garlic is not a language, but a smell. But 
when he had repeated the word several times, I 
found that he meant Gaelic; and when we had 
come to this understanding, we cordially shook 
hands and willinglj'- parted. One seldom encoun- 
ters a wilder or more good-natured savage than 
this stalwart wanderer. And meeting him raised 
my hopes of Cape Breton. 

We change horses again, for the last stage, at 
Marshy Hope. As we turn down the hill into this 
place of the mournful name, we dash past a pro- 



86 BADDECK, 



cession of five country wagons, which makes way 
for us ; everything makes way for us, even death 
itself turns out for the stage with four horses. 
The second wagon carries a long box, which reveals 
to us the mournful errand of the caravan. We 
drive into the stable, and get down while the fresh 
horses are put to. The company's stables are all 
alike, and open at each end with great doors. 
The stable is the best house in the place ; there 
are three or four houses besides, and one of them 
is white, and has vines growing over the front door, 
and hollyhocks by the front gate. Three or four 
women, and as many bare-legged girls, have come 
out to look at the procession, and we lounge 
towards the group. 

" It had a winder in the top of it, and silver 
handles," says one. 

" Well, I declare ; and you could 'a' looked right 
in?" 

" If I 'd been a mind to." 

*' Who has diedl" I ask. 

" It 's old woman Larue ; she lived on Gilead 
Hill, mostly alone. It 's better for her." 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 87 

" Had she any friends % " 

" One darter. They 're takin' her over Eden 
way, to bury her where she come from." 

"Was she a good woman 1" The traveller is 
naturally curious to know what sort of people die 
in Nova Scotia. 

"Well, good enough. Both her husbands is 
dead." 

The gossips continued talking of the burying. 
Poor old woman Larue ! It was mournful enough 
to encounter you for the only time in this world 
in this plight, and to have this glimpse of your 
wretched life on lonesome Gilead Hill. What 
pleasure, I wonder, had she in her life, and what 
pleasure have any of these hard-favored women in 
this doleful region? It is pitiful to think of it. 
Doubtless, however, the region is n't doleful, and 
the sentimental traveller would not have felt it so 
if he had not encountered this funereal flitting. 

But the horses are in. We mount to our 
places; the big doors swing open. 

" Stand away," cries the driver. 

The hostlei lets go Kitty's bridle, the horses 



88 BADDECK, 



plunge forward, and we are off at a gallop, taking 
the opposite direction from that pursued by old 
woman Larue. 

This last stage is eleven miles, through a pleas- 
anter country, and w^e make it in a trifle over an 
hour, going at an exhilarating gait, that raises our 
spirits out of the Marshy Hope level. The perfec- 
tion of travel is ten miles an hour, on top of a 
stage-coach ; it is greater speed than forty by rail. 
It nurses one's pride to sit aloft, and rattle past 
the farm-houses, and give our dust to the cringing 
foot tramps. There is something royal in the sway- 
ing of the coach body, and an excitement in the 
patter of the horses' hoofs. And what an honor 
it must be to guide such a machine through a 
region of rustic admiration ! 

The sun has set when w^e come thundering dow^n 
into the pretty Catholic village of Antigonish, — 
the most home-like place we have seen on the 
island. The twin stone towers of the unfinished 
cathedral loom up large in the fading light, and 
the bishop's palace on the hill — the home of the 
Bishop of Arichat — appears to be an imposing 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 89 

white barn with many staring windows. At An- 
Wgonish — with the emphasis on the last syllable 
— let the reader know there is a most comfortable 
inn, kept by a cheery landlady, where the stranger 
is served by the comely handmaidens, her daugh- 
ters, and feels that he has reached a home at last. 
Here we wished to stay. Here we wished to end 
this weary pilgrimage. Could Baddeck be as at- 
tractive as this peaceful valley % Should we find 
any inn on Cape Breton like this one 1 

" Never was on Cape Breton," our driver had 
said; "hope I never shall be. Heard enough 
about it. Taverns % You '11 find 'em occupied." 

" Fleas \ " 

"Wus." 

"But it is a lovely country *?" 

" I don't think it." 

Into what unknown dangers were we going"? 
Why not stay here and be happy 1 It was a soft 
summer night. People were loitering in the street ; 
the young beaux of the place going up and down 
with the belles, after the leisurely manner in youth 
and summer ; perhaps they were students from St. 



90 BADDECK, 



Xavier College, or visiting gallants from Guysbor- 
ough. They look into the post-office and the fancy 
store. They stroll and take their little provincial 
pleasure and make love, for all we can see, as if 
Antigonish were a part of the world. How they 
must look down on Marshy Hope and Addington 
Forks and Tracadie ! What a charming j)lace to 
live in is this ! 

But the stage goes on at eight o'clock. It will 
wait for no man. There is no other stage till eight 
the next night, and we have no alternative but a 
night ride. We put aside all else except duty 
and Baddeck. This is strictly a pleasure trip. 

The stage establishment for the rest of the jour- 
ney could hardlj' be called the finest on the conti- 
nent. The wagon was drawn by two horses. It 
was a square box, covered with painted cloth. 
Within were two narrow seats, facing each other, 
affording no room for the legs of passengers, and 
offering them no position but a strictly upright one. 
It was a most ingeniously uncomfortable box in 
which to put sleepy travellers for the night. The 
weather would be chilly before morning, and to 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 91 

sit upright on a narrow board all night, and shiver, 
is not cheerful. Of course, the reader says that 
this is no hardship to talk about. But the reader 
is mistaken. Anything is a hardship when it is 
unpleasantly what one does not desire or expect. 
These travellers had spent wakeful nights in the 
forests, in a cold rain, and never thought of com- 
plaining. It is useless to talk about the Polar suf- 
ferings of Dr. Kane to a guest at a metropolitan 
hotel, in the midst of luxury, when the mosquito 
sings all night in his ear, and his mutton-chop is 
overdone at breakfast. One does not like to be 
set up for a hero in trifles, in odd moments, and 
in inconspicuous places. 

There were two passengers besides ourselves, in- 
habitants of Cape Breton Island, who were return- 
ing from Halifax to Plaster Cove, where they were 
engaged in the occupation of distributing alcoholic 
liquors at retail. This fact we ascertained incident- 
ally, as we learned the nationality of our comrades 
by their brogue, and their religion by their lively 
ejaculations during the night. We stowed our- 
selves into the rigid box, bade a sorrowing good 



92 BADDECK, 



night to the landlady and her daughters, who 
stood at the inn door, and went jingling down the 
street towards the open country. 

The moon rises at eight o'clock in Nova Scotia. 
It came above the horizon exactly as we began our 
journey, a harvest-moon, round and red. When 
I first saw it, it lay on the edge of the horizon as if 
too heavy to lift itself, as big as a cart-wheel, and 
its disk cut by a fence-rail. With what a flood of 
splendor it deluged farm-houses and farms, and 
the broad sweep of level- country ! There could 
not be a more magnificent night in which to ride 
towards that geographical mystery of our boyhood, 
the Gut of Canso. 

A few miles out of town the stage stopped in 
the road before a post-station. An old woman 
opened the door of the farm-house to receive the 
bag which the driver carried to her. A couple of 
sprightly little girls rushed out to '' interview " the 
passengers, climbing up to ask their names and, 
with much giggling, to get a peep at their faces. 
And upon the handsomeness or ugliness of the 
faces they saw in the moonlight they pronounced 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 93 

with j)erfect candor. We are not obliged to say 
what their verdict was. Girls here, no doubt, as 
elsewhere, lose this trustful candor as they grow 
older. 

Just as we were starting, the old woman 
screamed out from the door, in a shrill voice, ad- 
dressing the driver, " Did you see ary a sick man 
'bout 'Tigonish ] " 

" Nary." 

" There 's one been round here for three or four 
days, pretty bad off; 's got the St. Vitus's. He 
wanted me to get him some medicine for it up to 
Antigonish. I 've got it here in a vial, and I 
wished you could take it to him." 

"Where is he?" 

" I dunno. I heem he 'd gone east by the Gut. 
Perhaps you '11 hear of him." All this screamed 
out into the night. 

"Well, I '11 take it." 

We took the vial aboard and went on ; but the 
incident powerfully affected us. The weird voice 
of the old woman was exciting in itself, and we 
could not escape the image of this unknown man, 



94 BADDECK, 



dancing about this region without any medicine, 
fleeing perchance by night and alone, and finally 
flitting away down the Gut of Canso. This fugi- 
tive mystery almost immediately shaped itself into 
the following simple poem : — 

" Tliere was an old man of Canso, 
Unable to sit or stan' so. 
When I asked him why he ran so, 
Says he, ' I 've St. Vitus' dance so. 
All do-\\-n the Gut of Canso.' " 

This melancholy song is now, I doubt not, sung 
by the maidens of Antigonish. 

In spite of the consolations of poetry, however, 
the night wore on slowly, and soothing sleep tried 
in vain to get a lodgment in the jolting wagon. 
One can sleep upright, but not when his head is 
every moment knocked against the framework of 
a wagon-cover. Even a jolly young Irishman of 
Plaster Cove, whose nature it is to sleep under 
whatever discouragement, is beaten by these cir- 
cumstances. He wishes he had his fiddle along. 
We never know what men are on casual acquaint- 
ance. This rather stupid looking fellow is a devo- 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 95 

tee of music, and knows how to coax the sweetness 
out of the unwilHng viohn. Somethiies he goes 
miles and miles on winter nights to draw the se- 
ductive bow for the Cape Breton dancers, and there 
is enthusiasm in his voice, as he relates exploits of 
fiddling from sunset till the dawn of day. Other 
information, however, the young man has not ; and 
when this is exhausted, he becomes sleepy again, 
and tries a dozen ways to twist himself into a pos- 
ture in which sleep will be possible. He doubles 
up his legs, he slides them under the seat, he sits 
on the wagon bottom ; but the w^agon swings and 
jolts and knocks him about. His patience under 
this punishment is admirable, and there is some- 
thing pathetic in his restraint from profanity. 

It is enough to look out upon the magnificent 
night ; the moon is now high, and swinging clear 
and distant ; the air has grown chilly ; the stars 
cannot be eclipsed by the greater light, but glow 
with a chastened fervor. It is on the whole a 
splendid display for the sake of four sleepy men, 
banging along in a coach, — an insignificant little 
vehicle with two horses. No one is up at any of 



96 BAD DECK, 



the farm-houses to see it ; no one appears to take 
any interest in it, except an occasional baying dog, 
or a rooster that has mistaken the time of night. 
By midnight we come to Tracadie, an orchard, a 
farm-house, and a stable. We are not far from 
the sea now, and can see a silver mist in the north. 
An inlet comes lapping up by the old house with a 
salty smell and a suggestion of oyster-beds. We 
knock up the sleeping hostlers, change horses, and 
go on again, dead sleepy, but unable to get a wink. 
And all the night is blazing with beauty. We 
think of the criminal who was sentenced to be 
kejDt awake till he died. 

The fiddler makes another trial. Temperately 
remarking, " I am very sleepy," he kneels upon 
the floor and rests his head on the seat. This posi- 
tion for a second promises repose ; but almost im- 
mediately his head begins to pound the seat, and 
beat a lively rat-a-plan on the board. The head 
of a wooden idol could n't stand this treatment 
more than a minute. The fiddler twisted and 
turned, but his head went like a trip-hammer on 
the seat. I have never seen a devotional attitude 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 97 

SO deceptive, or one that produced less favorable 
results. The youug man rose from his knees, 
and meekly said, — 

" It 's dam hard." 

If the recording angel took down this observa- 
tion, he doubtless made a note of the injured tone 
in which it was uttered. 

How slowly the night passes to one tipping and 
swinging along in a slowly moving stage ! But 
the harbinger of the day came at last. When the 
fiddler rose from his knees, I saw the morning-star 
burst out of the east like a great diamond, and I 
knew that Venus was strong enough to pull up 
even the sun, from whom she is never distant more 
than an eighth of the heavenly circle. The moon 
could not put her out of countenance. She blazed 
and scintillated with a dazzling brilliance, a throb- 
bing splendor, that made the moon seem a pale, 
sentimental invention. Steadily she mounted, in 
her fresh beauty, with the confidence and vigor of 
new love, driving her more domestic rival out of 
the sky. And this sort of thing, I suppose, goes 
on frequently. These splendors burn and this 
5 G 



98 BADDECK, 



panorama passes night after night down at the end 
of Nova Scotia, and all for the stage-driver, dozing 
along on his box, from Antigonish to the Strait. 

"Here you are," cries the driver, at length, 
when we have become wearily indifferent to where 
we are. A¥e have reached the ferry. The dawn 
has not come, but it is not far off. We step out 
and find a chilly morning, and the dark waters of 
the Gut of Canso flowing before us, lighted here 
and there by a patch of white mist. The ferry- 
man is asleep, and his door is shut. We call him 
by all the names known among men. We pound 
upon his house, but he makes no sign. Before he 
awakes and comes out, growling, the sky in the 
east is lightened a shade, and the star of the dawn 
sparkles less brilliantly. But the process is slow. 
The twilight is long. There is a surprising de- 
liberation about the preparation of the sun for 
rising, as there is in the movements of the boat- 
man. Both appear to be reluctant to begin the 
day. 

The ferryman and his shaggy comrade get 
ready at last, and we step into the clumsy yawl. 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 99 

and the slowly moving oars begin to pull us up 
stream. The strait is here less than a mile wide ; 
the tide is running strongly, and the water is full 
of swirls, — the little whirlpools of the rip-tide. 
The morning-star is now high in the sky ; the 
moon, declining in the west, is more than ever 
like a silver shield ; along the east is a faint flush 
of pink. In the increasing light we can see the 
bold shores of the strait, and the square projec- 
tion of Cape Porcupine below. 

On the rocks above the town of Plaster Cove, 
where there is a black and white sign, — Tele- 
grajih Cahle, — w^e set ashore our companions of 
the night, and see them climb up to their station 
for retailing the necessary means of intoxication 
in their district, with the mournful thought that 
we may never behold them again. 

As we drop dow^i along the shore, there is a wdiite 

sea-gull asleep on the rock, rolled up in a ball, 

with his head under his wing. The rock is drip- 

ping with dew, and the bird is as wet as hia hard 

bed. We pass within an oar's length of him, but 

he does not heed us, and we do not disturb \i\^ 
LofC. 



100 BADDECK, 



morning slumbers. For there is no such cruelty 
as the waking of anybody out of a morning nap. 

When we land, and take up our bags to ascend 
the hill to the white tavera of Port Hastings (as 
Plaster Cove now likes to be called), the sun lifts 
himself slowly over the tree-tops, and the magic 
of the night vanishes. 

And this is Cape Breton, reached after almost 
a week of travel. Here is the Gut of Canso, but 
where is Baddeck? It is Saturday morning; if 
we cannot make Baddeck by night, we might as 
well have remained in Boston. And who knows 
what we shall find if we get there? A forlorn 
fishing-station, a dreary hotel 1 Suppose we can- 
not get on, and are forced to stay here ? Asking 
ourselves these questions, we enter the Plaster 
Cove tavern. No one is stirring, but the house is 
open, and we take possession of the dirty public 
room, and almost immediately drop to sleej) in 
the fluffy rocking-chairs; but even sleep is not 
strong enough to conquer our desire to push on, 
and we soon rouse up and go in pursuit of infor- 
mation. 



AND THAT SORT OF TH/NG. 101 



No landlord is to be found, but there is an un- 
kempt servant in the kitchen, ^^ho probably does 
not see any use in making her toilet more than 
once a week. To this fearful creature is intrusted 
the dainty duty of prep-^ring breakfast. Her in- 
difference is equal to her lack of information, and 
her ability to convey information is fettered by 
her use of Gaelic as her native speech. But she 
directs us to the stable. There we find a driver 
2iitching his horses to a two-horse stage-wagon. 

" Is this stage for Baddeck 1 " 

" Not much." 

" Is there any stage for Baddeck 1 " 

"Not to-day." 

" Where does this go, and when 1 " 

" St. Peter's. Starts in fifteen minutes." 

This seems like "business," and we are inclined 
to try it, especially as we have no notion where 
St. Peter's is. 

" Does any other stage go from here to-day any- 
where else'?" 

" Yes. Port Hood. Quarter of an hour." 

Everything was about to happen in fifteen min- 



102 BADDECK, 



iites. We inquire further. St. Peter's is on the 
east coast, on the road to Sydney. Port Hood is 
on the west coast. There is a stage from Port 
Hood to Baddeck. It would land us there some- 
time Sunday morning ; distance, eighty miles. 

Heavens ! what a pleasure-trip. To ride eighty 
miles more without sleep ! We should simply be 
delivered dead on the Bras d'Or ; that is all. Tell 
us, gentle driver, is there no other way % 

"Well, there 's Jim Hughes, come over at mid- 
night with a passenger from Baddeck ; he 's in the 
hotel now ; perhaps he '11 take you." 

Our hope hung on Jim Hughes. The frowzy 
servant piloted us up to his sleeping-room. " Go 
right in," said she ; and we went in, according to 
the simple custom of the country, though it was a 
bedroom that one would not enter except on busi- 
ness. Mr. Hughes did not like to be disturbed, 
but he proved himself to be a man who could wake 
up suddenly, shake his head, and transact business, 
— a sort of Napoleon, in fact. Mr. Hughes stared 
at the intruders for a moment, as if he meditated 
an assault. 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 103 

" Do you live in Baddeck 1 " we asked. 
" No ; Hogamah, — half-way there." 
" Will you take us to Baddeck to-day 1 " 
Mr. Hughes thought. He had intended to sleep 
till noon. He had then intended to go over the 
Judique Mountain and get a boy. But he was 
disposed to accommodate. Yes, for money — sum 
named — he would give up his plans, and start 
for Baddeck in an hour. Distance, sixty miles. 
Here was a man worth having ; he could come to 
a decision before he w^as out of bed. The bargain 
was closed. 

We would have closed any bargain to escape a 
Sunday in the Plaster Cove hotel. There are dif- 
ferent sorts of hotel uncleanliness. There is the 
musty old inn, where the dirt has accumulated for 
years, and slow neglect has wrought a picturesque 
sort of dilapidation, the mouldiness of time, which 
has something to recommend it. But there is 
nothing attractive in new nastiness, in the vulgar 
union of smartness and filth. A dirty modern 
house, just built, a house smelling of poor whiskey 
and vile tobacco, its white paint grimy, its floors 



104 BADDECK, 



unclean, is ever so much worse than an old inn that 
never pretended to be anything but a rookery. I 
say nothing against the hotel at Plaster Cove. In 
fact, I recommend it. There is a kind of harmony 
about it that I like. There is a harmony between 
the breakfast and the frowzy Gaelic cook we saw 
" sozzling " about in the kitchen. There is a har- 
mony between the appearance of the house and 
the appearance of the buxom young housekeeper 
who comes upon the scene later, her hair saturated 
with the fatty matter of the bear. The traveller 
will experience a pleasure in paying his bill and 
departing. 

Although Plaster Cove seems remote on the 
map, we found that we were right in the track of 
the world's news there. It is the transfer station 
of the Atlantic Cable Company, where it exchanges 
messages with the Western Union. In a long 
wooden building, divided into two main apartments, 
are twenty to thirty operators employed. At eight 
o'clock the English force was at work receiving 
the noon messages from London. The American 
operators had not yet come on, for New York 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 105 

business would not begin for an hour. Into these 
rooms is poured daily the news of the world, and 
these young fellows toss it about as lightly as if it 
were household gossip. It is a marvellous exchange, 
however, and we had intended to make some re- 
flections here upon the en rapport feeling, so to 
speak, with all the world, which we experienced 
w^hile there ; but our conveyance was waiting. 
We telegTaphed our coming to Baddeck, and de- 
parted. For twenty-five cents one can send a 
despatch to any part of the Dominion, except the 
region w'here the Western Union has still a foot- 
hold. 

Our conveyance was a one-horse wagon, with 
one seat. The horse was well enough, but the 
seat was narrow for three people, and the entire 
establishment had in it not much prophecy of 
Baddeck for that day. But we knew little of the 
power of Cape Breton driving. It became evident 
that we should reach Baddeck soon enough if we 
could cling to that wagon-seat. The morning sun 
was hot. The way was so uninteresting that we 
almost wished ourselves back in Nova Scotia. The 



106 BADDECK, 



sandy road was bordered with discouraged ever- 
greens, through which we had ghmpses of sand- 
drifted farms. If Baddeck was to be hke this, we 
had come on a fool's errand. There were some 
savage, low hills, and the Judique Mountain showed 
itself as we got away from the town. In this first 
stage, the heat of the suu, the monotony of the 
road, and the scarcity of sleep during the past 
thirty-six hours, were all unfavorable to our keep- 
ing on the wagon-seat. We nodded separately, 
we nodded and reeled in unison. But asleep or 
awake, the driver drove like a son of Jehu. Such 
driving is the fashion on Cape Breton Island. 
Especially down hill, we made the most of it ; if 
the horse was on a run, that was only an induce- 
ment to apply the lash ; speed gave the promise 
of greater possible speed. The wagon rattled like 
a bark-mill ; it swirled and leaped about, and we 
finally got the exciting impression that if the whole 
thing went to pieces, we should somehow go on, — 
such was our impetus. Round corners, over ruts 
and stones, and up hill and down, we went jolting 
and swinging, holding fast to the seat, and putting 



AND TEAT SORT OF THING. 107 

our trust in things in general. At the end of fif- 
teen miles, we stopped at a Scotch farm-house, 
where the driver kept a rela}^, and changed horse. 
The people were Highlanders, and spoke little 
English; we had struck the beginning of the Gaelic 
settlement. From here to Hogamah we should 
encounter only the Gaelic tongue ; the inhabitants 
are all Catholics. Very civil peoj)le apparently, 
and living in a kind of niggardly thrift, such as 
the cold land affords. We saw of this family the 
old man, who had come from Scotland fifty years 
ago, his stalwart son, six feet and a half high, 
maybe, and two buxom daughters, going to the 
hay-field, — good solid Scotch lassies, who smiled 
in English, but spoke only Gaelic. The old man 
coald speak a little English, and was disposed to 
be both communicative and inquisitive. He asked 
our business, names, and residence. Of the United 
States he had only a dim conception, but his mind 
rather rested upon the statement that we lived 
" near Boston." He complained of the degeneracy 
of the times. All the young men had gone away 
fi'om Cape Breton ; might get rich if they would 



108 BADDECK, 



stay and work the farms. But no one liked to 
work nowadays. From life, we diverted the talk 
t<j» literature. We inquired what books they had. 

'' Of course you all have the poems of Burns % " 

" What 's the name o' the mon % " 

" Burns, Robert Burns." 

" Never heerd tell of such a mon. Have heard 
of Robert Bruce. He was a Scotchman." 

This was nothing short of refreshing, to find a 
►Scotchman who had never heard of Robert Burns ! 
It was worth the whole journey to take this honest 
man by the hand. How far would I not travel to 
talk with an American who had never heard of 
George Washington ! 

The way was more varied during the next stage ; 
we passed through some pleasant valleys and jdIc- 
turesque neighborhoods, and at length, winding 
around the base of a wooded range, and crossing 
its point, we came upon a sight that took all the 
sleep out of us. This was the famous Bras d'Or. 

The Bras d'Or is the most beautiful salt-water 
lake I have ever seen, and more beautiful than we 
had imagined a body of salt water could be. If 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 109 

the reader will take the map, he will see that two 
narrow estuaries, the Great and the Little Bras 
d'Or, enter the island of Cape Breton, on the ragged 
northeast coast, above the town of Sydney, and 
flow in, at length widening out and occupying the 
heart of the island. The water seeks out all the 
low places, and ramifies the interior, running away 
into lovely bays and lagoons, leaving slender 
tongues of land and picturesque islands, and bring- 
ing into the recesses of the land, to the remote 
comitry farms and settlements, the flavor of salt, 
and the fish and mollusks of the briny sea. There 
is very little tide at any time, so that the shores 
are clean and sightly for the most part, like those 
of fresh-water lakes. It has all the pleasantness 
of a fresh-water lake, with all the advantages of a 
salt one. In the streams which run into it are the 
speckled trout, the shad, and the salmon ; out of 
its depths are hooked the cod and the mackerel, 
and in its bays fattens the oyster. This irregular 
lake is about a hundred miles long, if you meas- 
ure it skilfully, and in some places ten miles broad ; 
but so indented is it, that I am not sure but one 



110 BADDECK, 



would need, as we were informed, to ride a thou- 
sand miles to go round it, following all its incur- 
sions into the land. The hills about it are never 
more than five or six hundred feet high, but they 
are high enough for reposeful beautj^, and offer 
everywhere pleasing lines. 

What we first saw was an inlet of the Bras 
d'Or, called, by the driver, Hogamah Bay. At its 
entrance were long, wooded islands, beyond which 
we saw the backs of graceful hills, like the capes 
of some poetic sea-coast. The bay narrowed to a 
mile in width where we came upon it, and ran 
several miles inland to a swamp, round the head 
of which we must go. Opposite was the village 
of Hogamah. I had my suspicions from the be- 
ginning about this name, and now asked the dri- 
ver, who was liberally educated for a driver, how 
he spelled " Hogamah." 

" Why-ko-ko-magh. Hogamah." 

Sometimes it is called Wykogamah. Thus the 
innocent traveller is misled. Along the Whyko- 
komagh Bay we come to a permanent encampment 
of the Micmac Indians, — a dozen wi.o-wams in the 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. Ill 

pine woods. Though himber is plenty, they refuse 
to live in houses. The wigwams, however, are 
more picturesque than the square frame houses of 
the whites. Built up conically of poles, Avith a 
hole in the top for the smoke to escape, and often 
set up a little from the ground on a timber 
foundation, they are as pleasing to the eye as 
a Chinese or Turkish dwelling. They may be 
cold in winter, but blessed be the tenacity of bar- 
barism, which retains this agreeable architecture. 
The men live by hunting in the season, and the 
women support the family by making moccasins 
and baskets. These Indians are most of them good 
Catholics, and they try to go once a year to mass 
and a sort of religious festival held at St. Peter's, 
where their sins are forgiven in a yearly lump. 

At Whykokomagh, a neat fishing village of white 
houses, we stopped for dinner at the Inverness 
House. The house was very clean, and the tidy 
landlady gave us as good a dinner as she could of 
the inevitable green tea, toast, and salt fish. She 
was Gaelic, but Protestant, as the village is, and 
showed us with pride her Gaelic Bible and hymn- 



112 BAD DECK, 



book. A peaceful place, this Whykokomagh ; the 
lapsing waters of Bras d'Or made a summer music 
all along the quiet street ; the bay lay smiling 
with its islands in front, and an amphitheatre of 
hills rose behind. But for the line of telegraph 
poles one might have fancied he could have se- 
curity and repose here. 

We put a fresh pony into the shafts, a beast 
born with an everlasting imeasiness in his legs, 
and an amount of " go " in him which suited his 
reckless driver. We no longer stood upon the 
order of our going ; we went. As we left the 
village we passed a rocky hay-field, where the 
Gaelic former was gathering the scanty yield of 
gi'ass. A comely Indian girl was stowing the hay 
and treading it down on the wagon. The driver 
hailed the farmer, and they exchanged Gaelic rep- 
artee which set all the hay-makers in a roar, and 
caused the Indian maid to darkly and sweetly 
beam upon us. We asked the driver what he had 
said. He had only inquired what the man would 
take for the load as it stood ! A joke is a joke 
down this way. 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 113 

I am not about to describe this drive at length, 
in order that the reader may skip it ; for I know 
the reader, being of Hke passion and fashion with 
him. From the time we first struck the Bras d'Or 
for thirty miles we rode in constant sight of its 
magnificent water. Now we were two hundred 
feet above the water, on the hillside, skirting a 
point or following an indentation ; and now we 
were diving into a narrow valley, crossing a stream, 
or turning a sharp corner, but always with the Bras 
d'Or in view, the afternoon sun shining on it, soft- 
ening the outlines of its embracing hills, casting a 
shadow from its wooded islands. Sometimes we 
opened on a broad water plain bounded by the 
Watchabaktchkt hills, and again we looked over 
hill after hill receding into the soft and hazy blue 
of the land beyond the great mass of the Bras 
d'Or. The reader can compare the view and the 
ride to the Bay of Naples and the Cornice Road ; 
we did nothing of the sort ; we held on to the 
seat, prayed that the harness of the pony might 
not break, and gave constant expression to our 
wonder and delight. For a week we had schooled 



114 BADDECK, 

ourselves to expect nothing more of this wicked 
world, but here was an enchanting vision. 

The only phenomenon worthy the attention of 
any inquiring mind, in this whole record, I will 
now describe. As we drove along the side of a hill, 
and at least two hundred feet above the water, 
the road suddenly diverged and took a circuit 
higher up. The driver said that was to avoid a 
sink-hole in the old road, — a great curiosity, 
which it was worth while to examine. Beside the 
old road was a circular hole, which nipped out a 
part of the road-bed, some twenty-five feet in di- 
ameter, filled with water almost to the brim, but 
not running over. The water was dark in color, 
and I fancied had a brackish taste. The driver 
said that a few weeks before, when he came this 
way, it was solid ground where this well now 
opened, and that a large beech-tree stood there. 
When he returned next day, he found this hole 
full of water, as we saw it, and the large tree had 
sunk in it. The size of the hole seemed to be de- 
termined by the reach of the roots of the tree. 
The tree had so entirely disappeared, that he could 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 115 

not with a long pole touch its top. Since then 
the ^^'ater had neither subsided nor overflowed. 
The ground about was compact gravel. We tried 
sounding the hole with poles, but could make 
nothing of it. The water seemed to have no out- 
let nor inlet ; at least, it did not rise or fall. 
Why should the solid hill give way at this place, 
and swallow up a tree 1 and if the water had any 
connection with the lake, two hundred feet below 
and at some distance away, why did n't the water 
run out ] Why should the unscientific traveller 
have a thing of this kind thrown in his way 1 The 
driver did not know. 

This phenomenon made us a little suspicious of 
the foundations of this island, which is already 
invaded by the jealous ocean, and is anchored to 
the continent only by the cable. 

The drive became more charming as the sun 
went down, and we saw the hills grow purple 
beyond the Bras d'Or. The road wound around 
lovely coves and across low promontories, giving 
us new beauties at every turn. Before dark we 
had crossed the Middle River and the Big Bad- 



116 BADDECK, 



deck, on long wooden bridges, which straggled over 
sluggish w^aters and long reaches of marsh, upon 
which Mary might have been sent to call the cat- 
tle home. These bridges were shaky and wanted 
a plank at intervals, but they are in keeping with 
the enterprise of the country. As dusk came on, 
we crossed the last hill, and were bowling along 
by the still gleaming water. Lights began to 
appear in infrequent farm-houses, and under cover 
of the gathering night the houses seemed to be 
stately mansions ; and we fancied we were on a 
noble highway, lined with elegant suburban sea- 
side residences, and about to drive into a town of 
wealth and a port of great commerce. We were, 
nevertheless, anxious about Baddeck. What sort 
of haven were we to reach after our heroic (with 
the reader's permission) week of travel 1 Would 
the hotel be like that at Plaster Cove % Were our 
thirty-six hours of sleepless staging to terminate 
in a night of misery and a Sunday of discomfort 1 

We came into a straggling village ; that we 
could see by the starlight. But we stopped at the 
door of a very unhotel-like appearing hotel. It 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 117 

had in front a flower-garden ; it was blazing with 
welcome lights ; it opened hospitable doors, and 
we were received by a family who expected us. 
The house was a large one, for two guests ; and 
we enjoyed the luxury of spacious rooms, an 
abundant supper, and a friendly welcome ; and, in 
short, found ourselves at home. The proprietor 
of the Telegraph House is the superintendent of 
the land lines of Cape Breton, a Scotchman, of 
course ; but his wife is a Newfoundland lady. 
We cannot violate the sanctity of what seemed 
like private hospitality by speaking freely of this 
lady and the lovely girls, her daughters, whose 
education has been so admirably advanced in the 
excellent school at Baddeck ; but w^e can confi- 
dently advise any American who is going to New- 
foundland, to get a wife there, if he wants one 
at all. It is the only new article he can bring 
from the Provinces that he will not have to pay 
duty on. And here is a suggestion to our tariff- 
mongers for the "protection" of New England 
women. 

The reader probably cannot appreciate the de- 



118 BADDECK. 



licious sense of rest and of achievement which we 
enjoyed in this tidy inn, nor share the anticipa- 
tions of undisturbed, luxurious sleep, in which we 
indulged as we sat upon the upper balcony after 
supper, and saw the moon rise over the glistening 
Bras d'Or and flood with light the islands and 
headlands of the beautiful bay. Anchored at 
some distance from the shore was a slender coast- 
ing vessel. The big red moon happened to come 
up just behind it, and the masts and spars and 
ropes of the vessel came out, distinctly traced on 
the golden background, making such a night pic- 
ture as I once saw painted of a ship in a fiord 
of Norway. The scene was enchanting. And we 
respected then the heretofore seemingly insane 
impulse that had driven us on to Baddeck. 




IV. 



" He had no ill-will to the Scotch ; for, if he had been con- 
scious of that, he never would have thrown himself into the 
bosom of their country, and trusted to the protection of its 
remote inhabitants with a fearless confidence." — Boswell's 
Johnson. 




LTHOUGH it was an open and flagrant 
violation of the Sabbath day as it is 
kept in Scotch Baddeck, our kind hosts 
let us sleep late on Sunday morning, with no re- 
minder that we were not sleeping the sleep of the 
just. It was the charming Maud, a flitting sun- 
beam of a girl, who waited to bring us our break- 
fast, and thereby lost the opportunity of going to 
church with the rest of the family, — an act of 
gracious hospitality which the tired travellers 
appreciated. 

The travellers were unable, indeed, to awaken 
into any feeling of Sabbatical straitness. The 



120 BADDECK, 



morning was delicious, — such a morning as never 
visits any place except an island ; a bright, spark- 
ling morning, with the exhilaration of the air 
softened by the sea. What a day it was for 
idleness, for voluptuous rest, after the flight by 
day and night from St. John ! It w^as enough, 
now that the morning w^as fully opened and ad- 
vancing to the splendor of uoon, to sit upon the 
upper balcony, looking upon the Bras d'Or and the 
peaceful hills beyond, reposeful and yet spark- 
ling with the stir and color of summer, and inhale 
the balmy air. (We greatly need another word 
to describe good air, properly heated, besides this 
overworked "balmy.") Perhaps it might in some 
regions be considered Sabbath-keeping, simply to 
rest in such a soothing situation, — rest, and not 
incessant activity, having been one of the original 
designs of the day. 

But our travellers were from New England, and 
they were not willing to be outdone in the matter 
of Sunday observances by such an out-of-the-way 
and nameless place as Baddeck. They did not 
set themselves up as missionaries to these be- 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 121 

nighted Gaelic people, to teach them by example 
that the notion of Sunday which obtained two 
hundred j^ears ago in Scotland had been modified, 
and that the sacredness of it had pretty much 
disappeared with the unpleasantness of it. They 
rather lent themselves to the humor of the hour, 
and probably by their demeanor encouraged the 
respect for the day on Cape Breton Island. Nei- 
ther by birth nor education were the travellers 
fishermen on Sunday, and they were not moved 
to tempt the authorities to lock them up for 
dropping here a line and there a line on the 
Lord's day. 

In foct, before I had finished my second cup 
of Maud-mixed coffee, my companion, with a little 
show of haste, had gone in search of the kirk, and I 
followed him, with more scrupulousness, as soon as 
I could without breaking the day of rest. Although 
it was Sunday, I could not but notice that Baddeck 
was a clean-looking village of white wooden houses, 
of perhaps seven or eight hundred inhabitants; 
that it stretched along the bay for a mile ^r more, 
straggling off into fiirm-houses at each end, lying 
6 



122 BADDECK, 



for the most part on the sloping curve of the bay. 
There were a few country-looking stores and shops, 
and on the shore three or four rather decayed and 
shaky wharves ran into the water, and a few 
schooners lay at anchor near them ; and the usual 
decaying warehouses leaned about the docks. A 
peaceful and perhaps a thriving place, but not a 
bustling place. As I walked down the road, a 
sail-boat put out from the shore and slowly dis- 
appeared round the island in the direction of the 
Grand Narrows. It had a small pleasure party 
on board. None of them were drowned that day, 
and I learned at night that they were Roman 
Catholics from Whykokomagh. 

The kirk, which stands near the water, and at 
a distance shows a pretty wooden spire, is after 
the pattern of a New England meeting-house. 
When I reached it, the house was full and the 
service had begun. There was something familiar 
in the bareness and uncompromising plainness 
and ugliness of the interior. The pews had high 
backs, with narrow, uncushioned seats. The pul- 
pit was high, — a sort of theological fortification, 



AiYB THAT SORT OF THING. 123 

— approached by wide, curving flights of stairs on 
either side. Those who occupied the near seats 
to the right and left of the pulj)it had in front 
of them a blank board partition, and could not 
by any possibility see the minister, though they 
broke their necks backwards over their high coat- 
collars. The congregation had a striking resem- 
blance to a country New England congregation 
of say twenty years ago. The clothes they wore 
had been Sunday clothes for at least that length 
of time. Such clothes have a look of I know not 
what devout and painful respectability, that is in 
keeping with the worldly notion of rigid Scotch 
Presbyterianism. One saw w^ith pleasure the 
fresh and rosy -cheeked children of this strict 
generation, but the women of the audience were 
not in appearance different from newly arrived 
and respectable Irish immigrants. They w^ore a 
white cap with long frills over the forehead, and 
I black handkerchief thrown over it and hanging 
down the neck, — a quaint and not unj^leasing 
disguise. 

The house, as I said, was crowded. It is the 



124 BADDECK, 



custom in this region to go to church, — for 
whole famiUes to go, even the smallest children ; 
and they not unfrequently walk six or seven miles 
to attend the service. There is a kind of merit 
in this act that makes up for the lack of certain 
other Christian virtues that are practised else- 
where. The service was worth coming seven 
miles to participate in ! — it was about two hours 
long, and one might well feel as if he had per- 
formed a work of long-suffering to sit through it. 
The singing was strictly congregational. Con- 
gregational singing is good (for those who like it) 
when the congregation can sing. This congrega- 
tion could not sing, but it could grind the Psalms 
of David powerfull}^ They sing nothing else but 
the old Scotch version of the Psalms, in a patient 
and faithful long metre. And this is regarded, 
and with considerable i^lausibility, as an act of 
worship. It certainly has small element of pleas- 
ure in it. Here is a stanza from Psalm xlv., 
which the congregation, without any instrumental 
nonsense, went through in a dragging, drawling 
manner, and with perfect individual independence 
as to time : — 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 125 

" Thine arrows sharply pierce the heart of th' enemies of the 
king ; 
And mider thy suh-jec-shi-on the people down do bring." 

The sermon was extempore, and in English with 
Scotch pronunciation; and it filled a solid hour 
of time. T am not a good judge of sermons, and 
this one was mere chips to me ; but my com- 
panion, who knows a sermon when he hears it, 
said that this was strictly theological, and Scotch 
theology at that, and not at all expository. It 
was doubtless my fault that I got no idea what- 
ever from it. But the adults of the congregation 
appeared to be jDerfectly satisfied with it ; at least 
they sat bolt upright and nodded assent continu- 
ally. The children all went to sleep under it, 
without any hypocritical show of attention. To 
be sure, the day was warm and the house was 
unventilated. If the windows had been opened 
so as to admit the fresh air from the Bras D'Or, 
I presume the hard-working farmers and their 
wives would have resented such an interference 
with their ordained Sunday na,ps, and the preach- 
er's sermon would have seemed more musty than 



126 BADDECK, 



it appeared to be in that congenial and drowsy- 
air. Considering that only half of the congrega- 
tion conld nnderstand the preacher, its behavior 
was exemplary. 

After the sermon, a collection was taken up for 
the minister; and I noticed that nothing but 
pennies rattled into the boxes, — a melancholy 
sound for the pastor. This might appear nig- 
gardly on the part of these Scotch Presbyterians, 
but it is on principle that they put only a penny 
into the box ; they say that they want a free 
gospel, and so far as they are concerned they have 
it. Although the farmers about the Bras d'Or are 
w^ell-to-do, they do not give their minister enough 
to keep his soul in his Gaelic body, and his poor 
support is eked out by the contributions of a 
missionary society. It was gratifying to learn 
that this was not from stinginess on the part of 
the people, but was due to their religious principle. 
It seemed to us that everybody ought to be good 
in a country where it costs next to nothing. 

When the service was over, about half of the 
people departed ; the rest remained in their seats, 



AND THAT SORT OF TUING. 127 

and prepared to enter upon their Sabbath exer- 
cises. These latter were all Gaelic people, who had 
understood little or nothing of the English service. 
The minister turned himself at once into a Gaelic 
preacher, and repeated in that language the long 
exercises of the morning. The sermon and perhaps 
the prayers were quite as enjoyable in Gaelic as in 
English, and the singing was a great improvement. 
It was of the same Psalms, but the congregation 
chanted them in a wild and weird tone and man- 
ner, as wailing and barbarous to modern ears as 
any Highland devotional outburst of two centuries 
ago. This service also lasted about two hours; 
and as soon as it was over the faithful minister, 
without any rest or refreshment, organized the 
Sunday school, and it must have been half past 
three o'clock before that was over. And this is 
considered a day of rest. 

These Gaelic Christians, we were informed, are 
of a very old pattern ; and some of them cling 
more closely to religious observances than to mo- 
rality. Sunday is nowhere observed with more 
strictness. The community seems to be a very 



128 BADDECK, 



orderly and thrifty one, except upon solemn and 
stated occasions. One of these occasions is the 
celebration of the Lord's Supper ; and in this the 
ancient Highland traditions are preserved. The 
rite is celebrated not oftener than once a year by 
any church. It then invites the noighboring 
churches to partake with it, — the celebration 
being usually in the summer and early fall months. 
It has some of the characteristics of a "camp- 
meeting." People come from long distances, and 
as many as two thousand and three thousand as- 
semble together. They quarter themselves with- 
out special invitation upon the members of the in- 
viting church. Sometimes fifty people will pounce 
upon one farmer, overflowing his house and his 
barn and swarming all about his premises, con- 
suming all the provisions he has laid up for his 
family, and all he can r-aise money to buy, and 
literally eating him out of house and home. Not 
seldom a man is almost ruined by one of these 
religious raids, — at least he is left with a debt of 
hundreds of dollars. The multitude assembles on. 
Thursday and remains ovei- Sunday. There la 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 129 

preaching every day, but there is something be- 
sides. Whatever may be the devotion of a part 
of the assembly, the four days are, in general, days 
of license, of carousing, of drinking, and of other 
excesses, which our informant said he would not 
particularize ; we could understand what they were 
by reading St. Paul's rebuke of the Corinthians 
for similar offences. The evil has become so great 
and burdensome that the celebration of this sacred 
rite will have to be reformed altogether. 

Such a Sabbath quiet pervaded the street of 
Baddeck, that the fast driving of the Gaels in their 
rattling, one-horse wagons, crowded full of men, 
women, and children, — released from their long 
sanctuary privileges, and going home, — was a sort 
of profanation of the day ; and we gladly turned 
aside to visit the rural jail of the town. 

Upon the principal street or road of Baddeck 
stands the dreadful prison-house. It is a story 
and a quarter edifice, built of stone and substan- 
tially whitewashed ; retired a little from the road, 
with a square of green turf in front of it, I should 
have taken it for the residence of the Dairyman's 
Q'' I 



130 BADDECK, 



Daughter, but for the iron gratings at the lower 
windows. A more inviting place to spend the 
summer in, a vicious person could not have. The 
Scotch keeper of it is an old, garrulous, obliging 
man, and keeps codfish tackle to loan. I think 
that if he had a prisoner who was fond of fishing, 
he would take him with him on the bay in pursuit 
of the mackerel and the cod. If the prisoner were 
to take advantage of his freedom and attempt to 
escape, the jailer's feelings would be hurt, and 
public opinion would hardly approve the prisoner's 
conduct. 

The jail door was hospitably open, and the 
keeper invited us to enter. Having seen the in- 
side of a good many prisons in our own country 
(officially), we were interested in inspecting this. 
It was a favorable time for doing so, for there hap- 
pened to be a man confined there, a circumstance 
which seemed to increase the keeper's feeling of 
responsibility in his office. The edifice had four 
rooms on the ground-floor, and an attic sleeping- 
room above. Three of these rooms, which were 
perhaps twelve feet by fifteen feet, were cells ; tha 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 131 

third was occupied by the jailer's fiimily. The 
family were now also occupying the front cell, — a 
cheerful room commanding a view of the village 
street and of the bay. A prisoner of a philosophic 
turn of mind, who had committed some crime of 
sufficient magnitude to make him willing to retire 
from the world for a season and rest, might enjoy 
himself here very well. 

The jailer exhibited his premises with an air of 
modesty. In the rear was a small yard, surround- 
ed by a board fence, in which the prisoner took his 
exercise. An active boy could climb over it, and 
an enterprising pig could go through it almost any- 
where. The keeper said that he intended at the 
next court to ask the commissioners to build the 
fence higher and stop up the holes. Otherwise 
the jail was in good condition. Its inmates were 
few ; in fact, it was rather apt to be empty : its 
occupants were usually prisoners for debt, or for 
some trifling breach of the peace, committed under 
the influence of the liquor that makes one " unco 
happy." Whether or not the people of the region 
have a high moral standard, crime is almost un- 



132 BADDECK, 



known ; the jail itself is an evidence of primeval 
simplicity. The great incident in the old jailer's 
life had been the rescue of a well-known citizen 
who was confined on a charge of misuse of public 
money. The keeper showed me a place in the 
outer wall of the front cell, where an attempt had 
been made to batter a hole through. The High- 
land clan and kinsfolk of the alleged defaulter 
came one night and threatened to knock the jail in 
pieces if he was not given up. They bruised the 
wall, broke the windows, and finally smashed in 
the door and took their man away. The jailer was 
greatly excited at this rudeness, and went almost 
immediately and purchased a pistol. He said that 
for a time he did n't feel safe in the jail without it. 
The mob had thrown stones at the upper windows, 
in order to awaken him, and had insulted him 
wdth cursing and offensive language. 

Having finished inspecting the building, I was 
unfortunately moved by I know not what national 
pride and knowledge of institutions superior to this 
at home, to say, — 

" This is a pleasant jail, but it does n't look 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 133 

much like our great prisons ; we have as many as 
a thousand to twelve hundred men in some of our 
institutions." 

"Aye, aye, I have heard tell," said the jailer, 
shaking his head in pity, " it 's an awfu' place, an 
aw^fu' place, — the United States. I suppose it 's 
the wickedest country that ever was in the w^orld. 
I don't know, — I don't know what is to become of 
it. It 's worse than Sodom. There was that dread- 
ful war on the South ; and I hear now it 's very un- 
safe, full of murders and robberies and corruption." 

I did not attempt to correct this impression con- 
cerning my native land, for I saw it was a comfort 
to the simple jailer, but I tried to put a thorn into 
him by saying, — 

" Yes, we have a good many criminals, but the 
majority of them, the majority of those in jails, are 
foreigners ; they come from Ireland, England, and 
the Provinces." 

But the old man only shook his head more 
solemnly, and persisted, " It 's an awfu' wicked 
country." 

Before I came aw^ay I was permitted to have an 



134 BAD DECK, 



interview with the sole prisoner, a very pleasant 
and talkative man, w^ho was glad to see company, 
especially intelligent company who understood 
about things, he was pleased to say. I have sel- 
dom met a more agreeable rogue, or one so philo- 
sophical, — a man of travel and varied experiences. 
He was a lively, robust Provincial of middle age, 
bullet-headed, with a mass of curly black hair, and 
small, round black eyes, that danced and sparkled 
with good-humor. He was by trade a carpenter, 
and had a work-bench in his cell, at which he 
worked on w^eek-days. He had been put in jail on 
suspicion of stealing a buffalo-robe, and he lay in 
jail eight months, w^aiting for the judge to come 
to Baddeck on his yearly circuit. He did not 
steal the robe, as he assured me, but it was found 
in his house, and the judge gave him four months 
in jail, making a year in all, — a month of which 
was still to serve. But he was not at all anxious 
for the end of his term ; for his wife was outside. 

Jock, for he was familiarly so called, asked me 
where I was from. As I had not found it very 
profitable to hail from the United States, and haa 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 135 

found, in fact, that the name United States did 
not convey any definite imj)ression to the average 
Cape Breton mind, I ventured upon the bold 
assertion, for which I hope Bostonians will forgive 
me, that I was from Boston. For Boston i? 
known in the eastern Provinces. 

" Are you 1 " cried the man, delighted. " I 've 
lived in Boston, myself. There 's just been an 
awful fire near there." 

" Indeed ! " I said ; "I heard nothing of it." 
And I was startled with the possibility that Bos- 
ton had burned up again while we were crawling 
along through Nova Scotia. 

"Yes, here it is, in the last paper." The man 
bustled away and found his late paper, and thrust 
it through the grating, with the inquiry, " Can 
you read 1 " 

Though the question was unexpected, and I 
had never thought before whether I could read or 
not, I confessed that I could probably make out 
the meaning, and took the newspaper. The report 
of the fire " near Boston " turned out to be the old 
news of the conflagration in Portland, Oregon ! 



136 BADDECK, 



Disposed to devote a portion of this Sunday to 
the reformation of this lively criminal, I continued 
the conversation with him. It seemed that he 
had been in jail before, and was not unaccustomed 
to the life. He was not often lonesome ; he had 
his work-bench and newspapers, and it was a 
quiet place ; on the whole, he enjoyed it, and 
should rather regret it when his time was up, a 
month from then. 

Had he any family*? 

" yes. When the census was round, I con- 
tributed more to it than anybody in town. Got a 
wife and eleven children." 

" Well, don't you think it would pay best to be 
honest, and live with your family, out of jail*? 
You surely never had anything but trouble from 
dishonesty." 

" That 's about so, boss. I mean to go on the 
square after this. But, you see," and here he 
began to speak confidentially, "things are fixed 
about so in this world, and a man 's got to live his 
life. I '11 tell you how it was. It all came about 
from a woman. I was a carpenter, had a good 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 137 

trade, and went down to St. Peter's to work. 
There I got acquainted with a Frenchwoman, — 
you know w^iat Frenchwomen are, — and I had to 
marry her. The fact is she was rather low fam- 
ily ; not so very low, you know, but not so good 
as mine. Well, I wanted to go to Boston to w^ork 
at my trade, but she would n't go ; and I went, 
but she would n't come to me, so in two or thi-ee 
years I came back. A man can't help himself, 
you know, when he gets in with a woman, espe- 
cially a Frenchwoman. Things did n't go very 
well, and never have. I can't make much out of 
it, but I reckon a man's got to live his life.. 
Ain't that about so?" 

" Perhaps so. But you 'd better try to mend 
matters when you get out. Won't it seem rather 
good to get out and see your wife and family 
again 1 " 

" I don't know. I have peace here." 

The question of his liberty seemed rather to 

depress this cheerful and vivacious philosopher, 

and I wondered what the woman could be from 

whose companionship the man chose to be pro- 



138 BADDECK, 



tected by jail-bolts. I asked the landlord about 
her, and his reply was descriptive and sufficient. 
He only said, " She 's a yelper." 

Besides the church and the jail there are no 
public institutions in Baddeck to see on Sunday, 
or on any other day ; but it has very good schools, 
and the examination-papers of Maud and her elder 
sister would do credit to Boston scholars even. 
You would not say that the place was stuffed with 
books, or overrun by lecturers, but it is an orderly, 
Sabbath-keeping, fairly intelligent town. Book- 
agents visit it with other commercial travellers, 
but the flood of knowledge, which is said to be 
the beginning of sorrow, is hardly turned in that 
direction yet. I heard of a feeble lecture-course 
in Halifax, supplied by local celebrities, some of 
them from St. John ; but so far as I can see, this 
is a virgin field for the platform philosophers 
under whose instructions we have become the 
well-informed people we are. 

The peaceful jail and the somewhat tiresome 
church exhaust one's opportunities for doing good 
in Baddeck on Sunday. There seemed to be no 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 139 

idlers about, to reprove ; the occasional lounger 
on the skeleton wharves was in his Sunday clothes, 
and therefore within the statute. No one, prob- 
ably, would have thought of rowing out beyond 
the island to fish for cod, — although, as that fish 
is ready to bite, and his associations are more or 
less sacred, there might be excuses for angling for 
him on Sunday, when it would be wicked to 
throw a line for another sort of fish. My earliest 
recollections are of the codfish on the meeting- 
house spires in New England, — his sacred tail 
pointing the way the wind w^ent. I did not know 
then why this emblem should be placed upon a 
house of worship, an}^ more than I knew why 
codfish-balls appeared always upon the Sunday 
breakfast-table. But these associations invested 
this plebeian fish with something of a religious 
character, which he has never quite lost, in my 
mind. 

Having attributed the quiet of Baddeck on Sun- 
day to religion, we did not know to what to lay 
the quiet on Monday. But its peacefulness con- 
tinued. I have no doubt that the farmers bejran 



140 BADDECK, 



to farm, and the traders to trade, and the sailors 
to sail ; but the tourist felt that he had come into 
a j^lace of rest. The promise of the red sky the 
evening before was fulfilled in another royal day. 
There was an inspiration in the air that one looks 
for rather in the mountains than on the sea-coast ; 
it seemed like some new and gentle compound of 
sea-air and land-air, which was the perfection of 
breathing material. In this atmosphere, which 
seemed to flow over all these Atlantic isles at this 
season, one endures a great deal of exertion with 
little fatigue ; or he is content to sit still, and has 
no feeling of sluggishness. Mere living is a kind 
of haj)piness, and the easy-going traveller is satis- 
fied w^ith little to do and less to see. Let the 
reader not understand that we are recommending 
him to go to Baddeck. Far from it. The reader 
was never yet advised to go to any place, wdiich 
he did not growl about if he took the advice and 
w^ent there. If he discovers it himself, the case is 
different. We know too well what would happen. 
A shoal of travellers would pour down upon Cape 
Breton, taking with them their dyspepsia, their 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 141 

liver-complaints, their "lights" derangements, their 
discontent, their guns and fishing-tackle, their big 
trunks, their desire for rapid travel, their enthusi- 
asm about the Gaelic language, their love for 
nature ; and they would very likely declare that 
there was nothing in it. And the traveller would 
probably be right, so far as he is concerned. There 
are few whom it would pay to go a thousand 
miles for the sake of sitting on the dock at Bad- 
deck when the sun goes down, and watching the 
purple lights on the islands and the distant hills, 
the red flush in the horizon and on the lake, and 
the creeping on of gray twilight. You can see all 
that as well elsewhere 1 1 am not so sure. There 
is a harmony of beauty about the Bras d'Or at 
Baddeck which is lacking in many scenes of more 
pretension. 

No. We advise no person to go to Cape Bre- 
ton. But if any one does go, he need not lack 
occupation. If he is there late in the fall or early 
in the winter, he may hunt, with good luck, if he 
is able to hit anything with a rifle, the moose and 
the caribou on that long wilderness peninsula 



142 BADDECK, 



between Baddeck and Aspy Bay, where the old 
cable landed. He may also have his fill of salmon 
fishing in June and July, especially on the Marjorie 
River. As late as August, at the time of our 
visit, a hundred people were camped in tents on 
the Marjorie, wiling the salmon with the delusive 
fly, and leading him to death with a hook in his 
nose. The speckled trout lives in all the streams, 
and can be caught whenever he will bite. The 
day we went for him appeared to be an off-day, a 
sort of holiday with him. 

There is one place, however, which the traveller 
must not fail to visit. That is St. Ann's Bay. 
He will go light of baggage, for he must hire a 
farmer to carry him from the Bras d'Or to the 
branch of St. Ann's harbor, and a part of his 
journey will be in a row-boat. There is no ride 
on the continent, of the kind, so full of picturesque 
beauty and constant surprises as this around the 
indentations of St. Ann's harbor. From the high 
promontory where rests the fishing village of St. 
Ann, the traveller will cross to English Town. 
High bluffs, bold shores, exquisite sea-views, 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 143 

mountainous ranges, delicious air, the society of 
a member of the Dominion Parhament, — these 
are some of the things to be enjoyed at this 
place. In point of grandeur and beauty it sur- 
passes Mt. Desert, and is really the most attract- 
ive place on the whole line of the Atlantic Cable. 
If the traveller has any sentiment in him he will 
visit here, not without emotion, the grave of the 
Nova Scotia Giant, w^ho recently laid his huge 
frame along this, his native shore. A man of 
gigantic height and awful breadth of shoulders, 
with a hand as big as a shovel, there was nothing 
mean or little in his soul. While the visitor is 
gazing at his vast shoes, which now can be used 
only as sledges, he will be told that the Giant was 
greatly respected by his neighbors as a man of 
ability and simple integrity. He was not spoiled 
by his metropolitan successes, bringing home from 
his foreign triumphs the same quiet and friendly 
demeanor he took away ; he is almost the only 
example of a successful public man, who did not 
feel bigger than he was. He performed his duty 
in life without ostentation, and returned to the 



144 BAD DECK, 



home he loved, unspoiled by the flattery of con- 
stant public curiosity. He knew, having tried 
both, how much better it is to be good than to 
be great. I should like to have known him. I 
should like to know how the world looked to him 
from his altitude. I should like to know how 
much food it took at one time to make an im- 
pression on him ; I should like to know what 
effect an idea of ordinary size had in his capacious 
head. I should like to feel that thrill of physical 
delight he must have experienced in merely closing 
his hand over something. It is a pity that he coul^ 
not have been educated all through, beginning at 
a high school, and ending in a university. There 
was a field for the multifarious new^ education ! 
If we could have annexed him with his island, I 
should like to have seen him in the Senate of the 
United States. He would have made foreign 
nations respect that body, and fear his lightest 
remark like a declaration of war. And he would 
have been at home in that body of great men. 
Alas ! he has passed away, leaving little influence 
except a good example of growth, and a grave 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 145 

which is a new promontory on that ragged coast 
swept by the winds of the untamed Atlantic. 

I could describe the Bay of St. Ann more mi- 
nutely and graphically if it were desirable to do 
so ; but I trust that enough has been said to 
make the traveller wish to go there. I more 
unreservedly urge him to go there, because we 
did not go, and we should feel no responsibility 
for his liking or disliking. He will go upon the 
recommendation of two gentlemen of taste and 
travel whom we met at Baddeck, residents of 
Maine and familiar with most of the odd and 
striking combinations of land and water in coast 
scenery. When a Maine man admits that there 
is any place finer than Mt. Desert, it is worth 
making a note of. 

On Monday we went a fishing. Davie hitched 
to a rattling wagon something that he called a 
horse, a small, rough animal with a great deal of 
" go " in him, if he could be coaxed to show it. 
For the first half-hour he went mostly in a circle 
in front of the inn, moving indifferently backwards 
or forwards, perfectly willing to go down the road, 
7 J 



146 BADDECK, 



but refusing to start along the bay in the direc- 
tion of Middle River. Of course a crowd collected 
to give advice and make remarks, and women 
appeared at the doors and windows of adjacent 
houses. Davie said he did n't care anything about 
the conduct of the horse, — he could start him 
after a while, — but he did n't like to have all 
the town looking at him, especially the girls j and 
besides, such an exhibition affected the market 
value of the horse. We sat in the wagon circling 
round and round, sometimes in the ditch and 
sometimes out of it, and Davie " whaled " the 
horse with his whip and abused him with his 
tongue. It was a pleasant day, and the specta- 
tors increased. 

There are two ways of managing a balky horse. 
My companion knew one of them and I the other. 
His method is to sit quietly in the wagon, and at 
short intervals throw a small pebble at the horse. 
The theory is that these repeated sudden annoy- 
ances will operate on a horse's mind, and he will 
try to escape them by going on. The spectators 
supplied my friend with stones, and he pelted the 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 147 

horse with measured gentleness. Probably the 
horse understood this method, for he did not 
notice the attack at all. My plan was to speak 
gently to the horse, requesting him to go, and 
then to follow the refusal by one sudden, sharp 
cut of the lash ; to wait a moment, and then repeat 
the operation. The dread of the coming lash after 
the gentle word will start any horse. I tried this, 
and with a certain success. The horse backed us 
into the ditch, and would probably have backed 
himself into the wagon, if I had continued. 
When the animal was at length ready to go, 
Davie took him by the bridle, ran by his side, 
coaxed him into a gallop, and then, leajoing in 
behind, lashed him into a run, which had little 
respite for ten miles, up hill or down. Remon- 
strance on behalf of the horse was in vain, and it 
was only on the return home that this specimen 
Cape Breton driver began to reflect how he could 
erase the welts from the horse's back before his 
father saw them. 

Our way lay along the charming bay of the 
Bras d'Or, over the sprawling bridge of the Big 



148 BADDECK, 



Baddeck, a black, sedgy, lonesome stream, to 
Middle River, which debouches out of a scraggy 
country into a bayou with ragged shores, about 
which the Indians have encampments, and in 
which are the skeleton stakes of fish- weirs. Sat- 
urday night we had seen trout jumping in the 
still water above the bridge. We followed the 
stream up two or three miles to a Gaelic settle- 
ment of farmers. The river here flows through 
lovely meadows, sandy, fertile, and sheltered by 
hills, — a green Eden, one of the few peaceful 
inhabited spots in the world. I could conceive 
of no news coming to these Highlanders later 
than the defeat of the Pretender. Turning from 
the road, through a lane and crossing a shallow 
brook, we reached the dwelling of one of the 
original McGregors, or at least as good as an 
original. Mr. McGregor is a fiery-haired Scotch- 
man and brother, cordial and hospitable, who 
entertained our wayward horse, and freely advised 
us where the trout on his farm were most likely 
to be found at this season of the year. 

It would be a great pleasure to speak well of 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 149 

Mr. McGregor's residence, but truth is older than 
Scotchmen, and the reader looks to us for truth 
and not flattery. Though the McGregor seems to 
have a good farm, his house is little better than a 
shanty, — a rather cheerless place for the " wo- 
man " to slave away her uneventful life in, and 
bring up her scantily clothed and semi-wild flock 
of children. And yet I suppose there must be 
happiness in it, — there always is where there are 
plenty of children, and milk enough for them. A 
white-haired boy who lacked adequate trousers, 
small though he was, was brought forward by his 
mother to describe a trout he had recently caught, 
which was nearly as long as the boy himself. 
The young Gael's invention was rewarded by a 
present of real fish-hooks. We found here in this 
rude cabin the hospitality that exists in all remote 
regions where travellers are few. Mrs. McGregor 
had none of that reluctance, which women feel in 
all more civilized agricultural regions, to " break a 
pan of milk," and Mr. McGregor even pressed us 
to partake freely of that simple drink. And he 
refused to take any pay for it, in a sort of surprise 



150 BADDECK, 



that such a simple act of hospitahty should have 
any commercial value. But travellers themselves 
destroy one of their chief pleasures. No doubt 
we planted the notion in the McGregor mind that 
the small kindnesses of life may be made profit- 
able, by offering to pay for the milk; and prob- 
ably the next travellers in that Eden will succeed 
in leaving some small change there, if they use a 
little tact. 

It was late in the season for trout. Perhapa 
the McGregor was aware of that when he freely 
gave us the run of the stream in his meadows, 
and pointed out the pools where we should be 
sure of good luck. It was a charming August 
day, just the day that trout enjoy lying in cool, 
deep places, and moving their fins in quiet con- 
tent, indifferent to the skimming fly or to the 
proffered sport of rod and reel. The Middle Kiver 
gracefully winds through this Vale of Tempe, over 
a sandy bottom, sometimes sparkling in shallows, 
and then gently reposing in the broad bends of 
the grassy banks. It was in one of these bends, 
where the stream swirled around in seductive 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 151 

eddies, that we tried our skill. We heroically 
waded the stream and threw our flies from the 
highest bank ; but neither in the black water nor 
in the sandy shallows could any trout be coaxed 
to spring to the deceitful leaders. We enjoyed 
the distinction of being the only persons who had 
ever failed to strike trout in that pool, and this 
w^as something. The meadows were sweet with 
the newly cut grass, the w^ind softly blew down 
the river, large white clouds sailed high overhead 
and cast shadow^s on the changing water ; but to 
all these gentle influences the fish were insensible, 
and sulked in their cool retreats. At length in a 
small brook flowing into the Middle River we 
found the trout more sociable ; and it is lucky 
that we did so, for I should with reluctance stain 
these pages with a fiction ; and yet the public 
would have just reason to resent a fish-story 
without any fish in it. Under a bank, in a pool 
crossed by a log and shaded by a tree, we found a 
drove of the speckled beauties at home, — dozens 
of them a foot long, each moving lazily a little, 
their black backs relieved by their colored fins. 



152 BADDECK, 



They must have seen us, but at first they showed 
no desire for a closer acquaintance. To the red 
ibis and the white miller and the brown hackle 
and the gray fly they were alike indifferent. Per- 
haps the love for made flies is an artificial taste 
and has to be cultivated. These at any rate were 
uncivilized trout, and it was only when we took 
the advice of the young McGregor and baited our 
hooks with the angle-worm, that the fish joined in 
our day's sport. They could not resist the lively 
wiggle of the worm before their very noses, and 
we lifted them out one after another, gently, and 
very much as if we were hooking them out of a 
barrel, until we had a handsome string. It may 
have been fun for them, but it was not much 
sport for us. All the small ones the young Mc- 
Gregor contemptuously threw back into the water. 
The sportsman wall perhaps learn from this inci- 
dent that there are plenty of trout in Cape Breton 
in August, but that the fishing is not exhilarating. 
The next morning the semi-weekly steamboat 
from Sydney came into the bay, and drew all the 
male inhabitants of Baddeck down to the wharf; 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 153 

and the two travellers, reluctant to leave the hos- 
pitable inn, and the peaceful jail, and the double- 
barrelled church, and all the loveliness of this 
reposeful place, prepared to depart. The most 
conspicuous person on the steamboat was a thin 
man whose extraordinary height was made more 
striking by his very long-waisted black coat and 
his very short pantaloons. He w^as so tall that he 
had a little difficulty in keeping his balance, and 
his hat was set upon the back of his head to pre- 
serve his equilibrium. He had arrived at that 
stage when people affected as he was are oratori- 
cal, and overflowing with information and good- 
nature. With what might in strict art be called 
an excess of expletives, he explained that he was a 
civil engineer, that he had lost his rubber coat, 
that he was a great traveller in the Provinces, 
and he seemed to find a humorous satisfaction in 
reiterating the fact of his familiarity with Painsec- 
J unction. It evidently hovered in the misty hori- 
zon of his mind as a joke, and he contrived to pre- 
sent it to his audience in that light. From the 
deck of the steamboat he addressed the tow^ri, and 
7* 



154 BADDECK. 



then, to the rehef of the passengers, he decided to 
go ashore. When the boat drew away on her voy- 
age we left him swaying perilously near the edge 
of the wharf, good-naturedly resenting the grasp 
of his coat-tail by a friend, addressing us upon the 
topics of the day, and wishing us prosperity and 
the Fourth of July. His was the only effort in the 
nature of a public lecture that we heard in the 
Provinces, and we could not judge of his ability 
without hearing a " course." 

Perhaps it needed this slight disturbance, and 
the contrast of this hazy mind with the serene 
clarity of the day, to put us into the most com- 
plete enjoyment of our voyage. Certainly, as we 
glided out upon the summer waters and began to 
get the graceful outlines of the widening shores, it 
seemed as if we had taken passage to the Fortu- 
nate Islands. 



V. 



" One town, one country, is very like another ; . . . . there 
are indeed minute discriminations both of places and manners, 
which, perhaps, are not wanting of curiosity, but which a 
traveller seldom stays long enough to investigate and com- 
pare." — Dr. JoH^'soN. 




HERE was no prospect of any excitement 
or of any adventure on the steamboat 
from Baddeck to West Bay, the south- 
ern point of the Bras d'Or. Judging from the 
appearance of the boat, the dinner might have 
been an experiment, but we ran no risks. It was 
enough to sit on deck forward of the wheel-house, 
and absorb, by all the senses, the delicious day. 
With such weather perpetual and such sceneiy 
always present, sin in this world would soon be- 
come an impossibility. Even towards the passen- 
gers fi'om Sydney, with their imitation English 



156 BADDECK, 



ways and little insular gossip, one could have only 
charity and the most kindly feeling. 

The most electric American, heir of all the ner- 
vous diseases of all the ages, could not but find 
peace in this scene of tranquil beauty, and sail on 
into a great and deepening contentment. Would 
the voyage could last for an age, with the same 
sparkling but tranquil sea, and the same environ- 
ment of hills, near and remote ! The hills ap- 
proached and fell away in lines of undulating grace, 
draped with a tender color which helped to carry 
the imagination beyond the earth. At this point 
the narrative needs to flow into verse, but my 
comrade did not feel like another attempt at 
poetry so soon after that on the Gut of Can so. A 
man cannot always be keyed up to the pitch of 
production, though his emotions may be highly 
creditable to him. But poetry-making in these 
days is a good deal like the use of profane lan- 
guage, — often without the least provocation. 

Twelve miles from Baddeck we passed through 
the Barra Strait, or the Grand Narrows, a pictu- 
resque feature in the Bras d'Or, and came into its 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 157 

widest expanse. At the Narrows is a small settle- 
ment with a flag-staff and a hotel, and roads 
leading to farm-houses on the hills. Here is a 
Catholic chapel ; and on shore a fat padre was 
waiting in his wagon for the inevitable priest we 
always set ashore at such a place. The missionary 
we landed was the young father from Arichat, 
and in appearance the pleasing historical Jesuit. 
Slender is too corpulent a word to describe his 
thinness, and his stature was primeval. Enveloped 
in a black coat, the skirts of which reached his 
heels, and surmounted by a black hat with an 
enormous brim, he had the form of an elegant 
toadstool. The traveller is always grateful for 
such figures, and is not disposed to quarrel with 
the faith which preserves so much of the ugly 
picturesque. A peaceful farming country this, 
but an unremunerative field, one would say, for 
the colporteur and the book-agent ; and winter 
must enclose it in a lonesome seclusion. 

The only other thing of note the Bras d'Or 
offered us before we reached West Bay was the 
finest show of medusae or jelly-fish that could be 



158 BADDECK, 



produced. At first there were dozens of these 
disk-shaped, transparent creatures, and then 
hundreds, starring the water like marguerites 
sprinkled on a meadow, and of sizes from that of 
a teacup to a dinner-plate. We soon ran into a 
school of them, a convention, a herd as extensive 
as the vast buffalo droves on the plains, a collec- 
tion as thick as clover-blossoms in a field in June, 
miles of them apparently ; and at leagth the boat 
had to push its way through a mass of them 
which covered the water like the leaves of the 
pond-lily, and filled the deeps far down with their 
beautiful contracting and expanding forms. I did 
not suppose there were so many jelly-fishes in all 
the world. What a repast they would have made 
for the Atlantic whale we did not see, and what 
inward comfort it would have given him to have 
swum through them once or twice with open 
mouth ! Our delight in this wondrous spectacle 
did not prevent this generous wish for the grati- 
fication of the whale. It is probably a natural 
human desire to sae big corporations swallow up 
little ones. - 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 159 

At the West Bay landing, where there is noth- 
ing whatever attractive, we found a great concourse 
of country wagons and clamorous drivers, to trans- 
port the passengers over the rough and uninterest- 
ing nine miles to Port Hawksbury. Competition 
makes the fare low, but nothing makes the ride 
entertaining. The only settlement passed through 
has the promising name of River Inhabitants, but 
we could see little river and less inhabitants; 
country and people seem to belong to that com- 
monplace order out of which the .traveller can ex- 
tract nothing amusing, instructive, or disagreeable ; 
and it was a great relief when we came over the 
last hill and looked down upon the straggling vil- 
lage of Port Hawksbury and the winding Gut of 
Canso. 

One cannot but feel a respect for this historical 
strait, on account of the protection it once gave 
our British ancestors. Smollett makes a certain 

Captain C ■ tell this anecdote of George II. and 

his enlightened minister, the Duke of Newcastle : 
" In the beginning of the war this poor, half-witted 
creature told me, in a great fright, that thirty 



160 BADDECK, 



thousand French had marched from Acadie to 
Cape Breton. * Where did they find transports ? ' 
said I. ' Transports ! ' cried he ; ' I tell you, they 
marched by land.' 'By land to the island of Cape 
Breton % ' ' What ! is Cape Breton an island 1 ' 
' Certainly.' ' Ha ! are you sure of that T When 
I pointed it out on the map, he examined it ear- 
nestly with his spectacles ; then taking me in his 

arms, ' My dear C ! ' cried he, ' you always 

bring us good news. I '11 go directly and tell the 
king that Cape Breton is an island.' " 

Port Hawksbury is not a modern settlement, 
and its public-house is one of the irregular, old- 
fashioned, snuffy taverns, with low rooms, chintz- 
covered lounges, and fat-cushioned rocking-chairs, 
the decay and untidiness of which are not offensive 
to the traveller. It has a low back porch looking 
towards the water and over a mouldy garden, damp 
and unseemly. Time was, no doubt, before the 
rush of travel rubbed off the bloom of its ancient 
hospitality and set a vigilant man at the door of the 
dining-room to collect pay for meals, that this was 
an abode of comfort and the resort of merry-making 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 161 

and frolicsome provincials. On this now decaying 
porch no doubt lovers sat in the moonlight, and 
vowed by the Gut of Canso to be fond of each 
other forever. The traveller cannot help it if he 
comes upon the traces of such sentiment. There 
lingered yet in the house an air of the hospitable 
old time ; the swift willingness of the waiting-maids 
at table, who were eager that we should miss none 
of the home-made dishes, spoke of it ; and as we 
were not obliged to stay in the hotel and lodge in 
its six-by-four bedrooms, we could afford to make 
a little romance about its history. 

While we were at supper the steamboat arrived 
from Pictou. We hastened on board, impatient 
for progress on our homeward journey. But haste 
was not called for. The steamboat would not sail 
on her return till morning. No one could tell why. 
It was not on account of freight to take in or dis- 
charge ; it was not in hope of more passengers, 
for they were all on board. But if the boat had 
returned that night to Pictou, some of the pas- 
sengers might have left her and gone west by rail, 
instead of wasting two or three days lounging 



162 BADDECK, 



through Northumberland Sound and idling in the 
harbors of Prince Edward Island. If the steam- 
boat would leave at midnight w^e could catch the 
railway train at Pictou. Probably the officials were 
aware of this, and they preferred to have our com- 
pany to Shediac. We mention this so that the 
tourist -who comes this way may learn to possess 
his soul in patience, and know^ that steamboats are 
not run for his accommodation, but to give him re- 
pose and to familiarize him with the country. It 
is almost impossible to give the unscientific reader 
an idea of the slow^ness of travel by steamboat in 
these regions. Let him first fix his mind on the 
fact that the earth moves through space at a speed 
of more than sixty-six thousand miles an hour. 
This is a speed eleven hundred times gi'eater than 
that of the most rapid express trains. If the dis- 
tance traversed by a locomotive in an hour is rep- 
resented by one tenth of an inch, it would need 
a hue nine feet long to indicate the corresponding 
advance of the earth in the same time. But a 
tortoise, pursuing his ordinary gait without a 
wager, moves eleven hundred times slower than 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 163 

an express train. We have here a basis of com- 
parison with the provincial steamboats. If we had 
seen a tortoise start that night from Port Hawks- 
bury for the west, we should have desired to send 
letters by him. 

In the early morning we stole out of the roman- 
tic strait, and by breakfast-time we were over St. 
George's Bay and round his cape, and making for 
the harbor of Pictou. During the forenoon some- 
thing in the nature of an excursion developed 
itself on the steamboat, but it had so few of the 
bustling features of an American excursion that I 
thought it might be a pilgrimage. Yet it doubt- 
less was a highly developed provincial lark. For 
a certain portion of the passengers had the unmis- 
takable excursion air : the half-jocular manner 
towards each other, the local facetiousness w^hich 
is so offensive to uninterested fellow-travellers, 
that male obsequiousness about ladies' shawls and 
reticules, the clumsy pretence of gallantry with 
each other's wives, the anxiety about the company 
luggage and the company health. It became pain- 
fully evident presently that it was an excursion, 



164 BADDECK, 



for we heard singing of that concerted and de- 
termined kind that depresses the spirits of all 
except those who join in it. The excursion had 
assembled on the lee guards out of the wind, and 
was enjoying itself in an abandon of serious musi- 
cal enthusiasm. We feared at first that there 
might be some levity in this performance, and that 
the unrestrained spirit of the excursion was work- 
ing itself off in social and convivial songs. But it 
was not so. The singers were provided with hymn- 
and-tune books, and what they sang they rendered 
in long metre and with a most doleful earnestness. 
It is agreeable to the traveller to see that the 
provincials disport themselves within bounds, and 
that an hilarious spree here does not differ much 
in its exercises from a prayer-meeting elsewhere. 
But the excursion enjoyed its staid dissipation 
amazingly. 

It is pleasant to sail into the long and broad 
harbor of Pictou on a sunny day. On the left is 
the Halifax railway terminus, and three rivers 
flow into the harbor from the south. On the right 
the town of Pictou, with its four thousand inhabi- 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 165 

tants, lies upon the side of the ridge that runs out 
towards the Sound. The most conspicuous build- 
ing in it as we approach is the Roman Catholic 
church ; advanced to the edge of the town and 
occupying the highest ground, it appears large, and 
its gilt cross is a beacon miles away. Its builders 
understood the value of a striking situation, a dom- 
inant position ; it is a part of the universal policy 
of this church to secure the commanding places 
for its houses of worship. We may have had no 
prejudices in favor of the Papal temporality when 
we landed at Pictou, but this church was the only 
one which impressed us, and the only one we took 
the trouble to visit. We had ample time, for the 
steamboat after its arduous trip needed rest, and 
remained some hours in the harbor. Pictou is 
said to be a thriving place, and its streets have a 
cindery appearance, betokening the nearness of 
coal mines and the presence of furnaces. But the 
town has rather a cheap and rusty look. Its 
streets rise one above another on the hillside, and, 
except a few comfortable cottages, we saw no evi- 
dences of wealth in tfie dwellings. The church, 



IGG BADDECK, 



when we reached it, was a commonplace brick 
structure, with a raw, unfinished interior, and 
weedy and untidy surroundings, so that our expec- 
tation of sitting on the inviting hill and enjoying 
the view was not realized ; and we were obliged to 
descend to the hot wharf and wait for the ferry- 
boat to take us to the steamboat which lay at the 
railway terminus opposite. It is the most unfair 
thing in the world for the traveller, without an 
object or any interest in the development of the 
country, on a sleepy day in August, to express any 
opinion whatever about such a town as Pictou. 
But we may say of it, without offence, that it 
occupies a charming situation, and may have an 
interesting future ; and that a person on a short 
acquaintance can leave it without regret. 

By stopping here we had the misfortune to lose 
oar " excursion," a loss that was soothed by no 
knowledge of its destination or hope of seeing it 
again, and a loss without a hope is nearty always 
painful. Going out of the harbor we encounter 
Pictou Island and Light, and presently see the 
low coast of Prince Edward Island, — a coast in- 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 167 

dented and agreeable to those idly sailing along 
it, in weather that seemed let down out of heaven, 
and over a sea that sparkled but still slept in a 
summer quiet. When fate puts a man in such a 
position and relieves him of all responsibility, 
with a book and a good comrade, and liberty to 
make sarcastic remarks upon his fellow-travellers, 
or to doze, or to look over the tranquil sea, he 
may be pronounced happy. And I believe that 
my companion, except in the matter of the com- 
rade, was happy. But I could not resist a wor- 
rying anxiety about the future of the British 
Provinces, which not even the remembrance of 
their hostility to us during our mortal strife with 
the Rebellion could render agTceable. For I could 
not but feel that the ostentatious and unconceala- 
ble prosperity of " the States " overshadows this 
part of the continent. And it w^as for once in 
vain that I said, " Have we not a common lan- 
guage and a common literature, and no copyright, 
and a common pride in Shakespeare and Hannah 
More and Colonel Newcome and Pepys's Diary 1 " 
I never knew this sort of consolation to fail before; 



168 BADDECK, 



it does not seem to answer in the Provinces as 
well as it does in England. 

New passengers had come on board at Pictou, 
new and hungry, and not all could get seats for 
dinner at the first table. Notwithstanding the 
supposed traditionary advantage of our birthplace, 
we were unable to despatch this meal with the 
celerity of aur fellow-voyagers, and consequently, 
while we lingered over our tea, we found ourselves 
at the second table. And we were rewarded by 
one of those pleasing sights that go to make up 
the entertainment of travel. There sat down 
opposite to us a fat man whose noble proportions 
occupied at the board the space of three ordinary 
men. His great face beamed delight the moment 
he came near the table. He had a low forehead 
and a wide mouth and small eyes, and an internal 
capacity that was a prophecy of famine to his 
fellow-men. But a more good-natured, pleased 
animal you may never see. Seating himself with 
unrepressed joy, he looked at us, and a great 
smile of satisfaction came over his face, that 
plainly said, " Now my time has come." Every 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 169 

part of his vast bulk said this. Most generously, 
by his friendly glances, he made us partners in 
his pleasure. With a Napoleonic grasp of his 
situation, he reached far and near, hauling this 
and that dish of fragments towards his plate, giv- 
ing orders at the same time, and throwing into 
his cheerful mouth odd pieces of bread and pickles 
in an unstudied and preliminary manner. When 
he had secured everything within his reach, he 
heaped his plate and began an attack upon the 
contents, using both knife and fork wath wonder- 
ful proficiency. The man's good-humor was con- 
tagious, and he did not regard our amusement as 
different in kind from his enjoyment. The spec- 
tacle was worth a journey to see. Indeed, its 
aspect of comicality almost overcame its gTossness, 
and even when the hero loaded in faster than he 
could swallow, and was obliged to drop his knife 
for an instant to arrange matters in his mouth 
with his finger, it was done with such a beaming 
smile that a pig would not take offence at it. 
The performance was not the merely vulgar thing 
it seems on paper, but an achievement unique 



170 BADDECK, 



and perfect, which one is not hkely to see more 
than once in a hfetime. It was only when the 
man left the table that his face became serious. 
We had seen him at his best. 

Prince Edward Island, as we approached it, 
had a pleasing aspect, and nothing of that remote 
friendlessness which its appearance on the map 
conveys to one ; a warm and sandy land, in a 
genial climate, without fogs, we are informed. In 
the winter it has ice communication with Nova 
Scotia, from Cape Traverse to Cape Tormentine, — 
the route of the submarine cable. The island is 
as flat from end to end as a floor. When it sur- 
rendered its independent government and joined 
the Dominion, one of the conditions of the union 
was that the government should build a railway 
the whole length of it. This is in process of 
construction, and the portion that is built aff'ords 
great satisfaction to the islanders, a railway being 
one of the necessary adjuncts of civilization ; but 
that there was great need of it, or that it would 
pay, we were unable to learn. 

We sailed through Hillsborough Bay and a 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 171 

narrow strait to Charlottetown, the capital, which 
lies on a sandy spit of land between two rivers. 
Our leisurely steamboat tied up here in the after- 
noon and spent the night, giving the passengers 
an opportunity to make thorougli acquaintance 
with the town. It has the appearance of a place 
from which something has departed ; a wooden 
town, with wide and vacant streets, and the air 
of waiting for something. Almost melancholy is 
the aspect of its freestone colonial building, where 
once the colonial legislature held its momentous 
sessions, and the colonial governor shed the de- 
lightful aroma of royalty. The mansion of the 
governor — now vacant of pomp, because that 
official does not exist — is a little withdrawn from 
the town, secluded among trees by the water-side. 
It is dignified with a winding approach, but is 
itself only a cheap and decaying house. On our 
way to it we passed the drill-shed of the local 
cavalry, which we mistook for a skating-rink, and 
thereby excited the contempt of an old lady of 
whom we inquired. Tasteful residences we did 
not find, nor that attention to flowers and gardens 



172 BADDECK, 



which the mild climate would suggest. Indeed, 
we should describe Charlottetown as a place where 
the hollyhock in the door-yard is considered an 
ornament. A conspicuous building is a large 
market-house shingled all over (as many of the 
public buildings are), and this and other cheap 
public edifices stand in the midst of a large 
square, which is surrounded by shabby shops for 
the most part. The town is laid out on a gen- 
erous scale, and it is to be regretted that we could 
not have seen it when it enjoyed the glory of a 
governor and court and ministers of state, and all 
the paraphernalia of a royal parliament. That 
the productive island, with its system of free 
schools, is about to enter upon a prosjDerous 
career, and that Charlottetown is soon to become 
a place of great activity, no one who converses 
with the natives can doubt ; and I think that even 
now no traveller will regret spending an hour or 
two there ; but it is necessary to say that the 
rosy inducements to tourists to spend the summer 
there exist only in the guide-books. 

We congratulated ourselves that we should at 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 173 

least have a night of dehghtful sleep on the steam^ 
boat in the quiet of this seckided harbor. But it 
was wisely ordered otherwise, to the end that we 
should improve our time by an interesting study 
of human nature. Towards midnight, when the 
occupants of all the state-rooms were supposed t(: 
be in profound slumber, there was an invasion of 
the small cabiii by a large and loquacious family, 
who had been making an excursion on the island 
railway. This family might remind an antiquated 
novel-reader of the delightful Brangtons in Eve- 
lina; they had all the vivacity of the pleasant 
cousins of the heroine of that story, and the same 
generosity towards the public in regard to their 
family affairs. Before they had been in the cabin 
an hour, we felt as if we knew every one of them. 
There was a great squabble as to where and how 
they should sleep ; and when this was over, the 
revelations of the nature of their beds and their 
peculiar habits of sleep continued to pierce the 
thin deal partitions of the adjoining state-rooms. 
When all the possible trivialities of vacant minds 
seemed to have been exhausted, there followed a 



174 BADDECK, 



half-hour of "Good night, jDa; good night, ma"j 
" Good night, pet " ; and " Are you asleep, ma 1 " 
"No." "Are you asleej), pa?" "No; go to 
sleep, pet." " I 'm going. Good night, pa ; good 
night, ma." " Good night, pet." " This bed is 
too short." " Why don't you take the other % " 
" I 'm all fixed now." " Well, go to sleep ; good 
night." "Good night, ma; good night, pa," — 
no answer. " Good night, ^9a." " Good night, 
pet." " Ma, are you asleep r' "'Most." "This 
bed is all lumps; I wish I'd gone down stairs.'' 
"Well, pa will get up." "Pa, are you asleep 1" 
"Yes." " It 's better now ; good night, pa." 
" Good night, pet." " Good night, ma." " Good 
night, pet." And so on in an exasperating repe- 
tition, until every passenger on the boat must 
have been thoroughly informed of the manner in 
which this interesting family habitually settled 
itself to repose. 

Half an hour passes with only a languid ex- 
change of family feeling, and then : " Pa *? " 
" Well, pet." " Don't call us in the morning ; 
we don't want any breakfast ; we want to sleej)." 



AND THAT SORT OF TUING. 175 

" I won't." " Good night, j)a ; good night, ma. 
Ma r' " What is it, dear 1 " " Good night, ma." 
" Good night, pet." Alas for youthful expecta- 
tions ! Pet shared her state-room with a young 
companion, and the two were carrying on a pri- 
vate dialogue during this public performance. 
Did these young ladies, after keeping all the pas- 
sengers of the boat awake till near the summer 
dawn, imagine that it was in the power of pa and 
ma to insure them the coveted forenoon slumber, 
or even the morning snooze % The travellers, 
tossing in their state-room under this domestic 
infliction, anticipated the morning with grim sat- 
isfaction ; for they had a presentiment that it 
would be impossible for them to arise and make 
their toilet without waking up every one in their 
part of the boat, and aggravating them to such an 
extent that they would stay awake. And so it 
turned out. The family grumbling at the unex- 
pected disturbance was sweeter to the travellers 
than all the exchange of family affection during 
the night. 

No one, indeed, ought to sleep beyond break- 



176 BABDECK, 



fast-time while sailing along the southern coast of 
Prince Edward Island. It was a sparkling morn- 
ing. When we went on deck we were abreast 
Cape Traverse ; the faint outline of Nova Scotia 
was marked on the horizon, and New Brunswick 
thrust out Cape Tormentine to gi-eet us. On the 
still, sunny coasts and the j)lacid sea, and in the 
serene, smiling sky, there was no sign of the com- 
ing tempest which was then raging from Hatteras 
to Cape Cod ; nor could one imagine that this 
peaceful scene would, a few days later, be swept 
by a fearful tornado, which should raze to the 
ground trees and dwelling-houses, and strew all 
these now inviting shores with wrecked ships and 
drowning sailors, — a storm which has passed into 
literature in " The Lord's-Day Gale " of Mr. Sted- 
man. 

Through this delicious weather why should the 
steamboat hasten, in order to discharge its passen- 
gers into the sweeping unrest of continental travel 1 
Our eagerness to get on, indeed, almost melted 
away, and we were scarcely impatient at all when 
the boat lounged into Halifax Bay, past Saluta- 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 177 

tion Point, and stoj)ped at Summerside. This 
little seaport is intended to be attractive, and it 
would give these travellers great pleasure to 
describe it, if they could at all remember how it 
looks. But it is a place that, like some faces, 
makes no sort of impression on the memory. We 
went ashore there, and tried to take an interest 
in the ship-building, and in the little oysters 
which the harbor yields; but whether we did 
take an interest or not has passed out of memory. 
A small, unpicturesque, wooden town, in the lan- 
guor of a provincial summer; why should we pre- 
tend an interest in it which we did not feel? It 
did not disturb our reposeful frame of mind, nor 
much interfere with our enjoyment of the day. 

On the forward deck, when we were under way 
again, amid a group reading and nodding in the 
sunshine, we found a pretty girl with a companion 
and a gentleman, whom we knew by intuition as 
the " pa " of the pretty girl and of our night of 
anguish. The pa might have been a clergyman 
in a small way, or the proprietor of a female 
boarding-school ; at any rate, an excellent and 
8* L 



178 BAD DECK, 



improving person to travel with, whose wilUng- 
ness to impart information made even the travel- 
lers long for a pa. It was no part of his plan of 
this family summer excursion, upon which he had 
come against his wish, to have any hour of it 
wasted in idleness. He held an open volume in 
his hand, and was questioning his daughter on 
its contents. He spoke in a loud voice, and with- 
out heeding the timidity of the young lady, who 
shrank from this public examination, and begged 
her father not to continue it. The parent was, 
however, either proud of his daughter's acquire- 
ments, or he thought it a good opportunity to 
shame her out of her ignorance. Doubtless, we 
said, he is instructing her upon the geography of 
the region we are passing through, its early set- 
tlement, the romantic incidents of its history, 
when French and English fought over it, and so is 
making this a tour of profit as well as pleasure. 
But the excellent and pottering father proved to 
be no disciple of the new education. Greece was 
his theme, and he got his questions, and his 
answers too, from the ancient school history in 
his hand. The lesson went on : — 



AND TEAT SORT OF THING. 179 

" Who was Alcibiades % " 

"AGreek." 

" Yes. When did he flourish % " 

" I can't think." 

" Can't think % What was he noted for % " 

" I don't remember." 

" Don't remember % I don't beheve you stud- 
ied this." 

" Yes, I did." 

"Well, take it now, and study it hard, and 
then I'll hear you again." 

The young girl, who is put to shame by this 
open persecution, begins to study, while the peev- 
ish and small tyrant, her pa, is nagging her with 
such soothing remarks as, " I thought you 'd have 
more respect for your pride"; "Why don't you 
try to come up to the expectations of your teach- 
er 1 " By and by the student thinks she has " got 
it," and the public exposition begins again. The 
date at which Alcibiades " flourished " was ascer- 
tained, but what he was "noted for" got hope- 
lessly mixed wdth what Themistocles was " noted 
for." The momentary impression that the battle 



180 BADDECK, 



of Marathon was fought by Salamis was soon dis- 
sijDated, and the questions contmued. 

" What did Pericles do to the Greeks 1 " 

" I don't know." 

" Elevated 'em, did n't he 1 Did n't he elevate 
'emr' 

"Yes, sir." 

" Always remember that ; you want to fix your 
mind on leading things. Remember that Pericles 
elevated the Greeks. Who was Pericles 1 " 

"He was a — " 

" Was he a philosopher 1 " 

"Yes, sir." 

" No, he was n't. Socrates was a philosopher. 
AVhen did he flourish 1 " And so on, and so on. 

my charming young countrywomen, let us 
never forget that Pericles elevated the Greeks ; 
and that he did it by cultivating the national 
genius, the national spirit, by stimulating art and 
oratory and the pursuit of learning, and infusing 
into all societ}^ a higher intellectual and social 
life ! Pa was this day sailing through seas and by 
shores that had witnessed some of the most stir- 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 181 

ring and romantic events in the early history of 
our continent. He might have had the eager 
attention of his bright daughter if he had unfolded 
these things to her in the midst of this most 
living landscape, and given her an ''object lesson" 
that she would not have forgotten all her days, 
instead of this pottering over names and dates 
that were as dry and meaningless to him as they 
were uninteresting to his daughter. At least, 
Pa, Educator of Youth, if you are insensible to 
the beauty of these summer isles and indifferent 
to their history, and your soul is wedded to 
ancient learning, why do you not teach your 
family to go to sleep when they go to bed, as 
the classic Greeks used to % 

Before the travellers reached Shediac, they had 
leisure to ruminate upon the education of Ameri- 
can girls in the schools set apart for them, and to 
conjecture how much they are taught of the geog- 
raphy and history of America, or of its social and 
literary growth ; and w^hether, when they travel on 
a summer tour like this, these coasts have any 
historical light upon them, or gain any interest 



182 BAD DECK, 



from the daring and chivalric adventurers who 
played their parts here so long ago. We did not 
hear pa ask when Madame de la Tour " flourished," 
though "flourish" that determined woman did, in 
Boston as well as in the French provinces. In 
the present woman revival may we not hope that 
the heroic women of our colonial history will have 
the prominence that is their right, and that 
woman's achievements will assume their proper 
place in aff'airs'? When women write history, some 
of our popular men heroes will, we trust, be made 
to acknowledge the female sources of their wis- 
dom and their courage. But at present women 
do not much aff'ect history, and they are more in- 
different to the careers of the noted of their own 
sex than men are. 

We expected to approach Shediac with a great 
deal of interest. It had been, when we started, 
one of the most prominent points in our projected 
tour. It was the pivot upon which, so to speak, 
we expected to swing around the Provinces. 
Upon the map it was so attractive, that we once 
resolved to go no farther than there. It once 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 183 

seemed to us that, if we ever reached it, we should 
be contented to abide there, in a place so remote, 
in a port so picturesque and foreign. But return- 
ing from the real east, our late interest in Shediac 
seemed unaccountable to us. Firmly resolved as 
I was to note our entrance into the harbor, I could 
not keep the place in mind ; and while we were in 
our state-room and before we knew it, the steam- 
boat lay at the wharf. Shediac appeared to be 
nothing but a wharf with a railway train on it, 
and a few shanty buildings, a part of them devoted 
to the sale of whiskey and to cheap lodgings. 
This landing, however, is called Point du Chene, 
and the village of Shediac is two or three miles 
distant from it ; we had a pleasant glimpse of it 
from the car windows, and saw nothing in its situ- 
ation to hinder its growth. The country about it 
is perfectly level, and stripped of its forests. At 
Painsec Junction we waited for the train from Hali- 
fax, and immediately found ourselves in the whirl 
of intercolonial travel. Why people should travel 
here, or why they should be excited about it, we 
could not see ; we could not overcome a feeling of 



184 BAD DECK, 



the unreality of the whole thmgj but yet we 
humbly knew that we had no right to be otherwise 
than awed by the extraordinary intercolonial rail- 
way enterprise and by the new life which it is in- 
fusing into the Provinces. We are free to say, 
however, that nothing can be less interesting than 
the line of this road until it strikes the Kennebeck- 
asis River, when the traveller will be called upon 
to admire the Sussex Valley and a very fair farm- 
ing region, which he would like to praise if it 
were not for exciting the jealousy of the " Garden 
of Nova Scotia." The whole land is in fact a 
garden, but differing somewhat from the Isle of 
Wight. 

In all travel, however, people are more interest- 
ing than land, and so it was at this time. As 
twilight shut down upon the valley of the Kenne- 
beckasis, we heard the strident voice of pa going 
on with the Grecian catechism. Pa was unmoved 
by the beauties of Sussex or by the colors of the 
sunset, which for the moment made picturesque 
the scraggy evergTeens on the horizon. His eyes 
were with his heart, and that was in Sparta. 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 185 

Above the roar of the car-wheels we heard his nag- 
ging inquiries. 

" What did Lycurgus do then ?" 

Answer not audible. 

" No. He made laws. Who did he make laws 
for?" 

" For the Greeks." 

" He made laws for the Lacedemonians. Who 
was another great lawgiver 1 " 

" It was — it was — Pericles." 

" No, it was n't. It was Solon. Who was 
Solon 1 » 

" Solon was one of the wise men of Greece." 

" That 's right. When did he flourish 1 " 

When the train stops at a station the classics 
continue, and the studious group attracts the 
attention of the passengers. Pa is well pleased, 
but not so the young lady, who beseechingly 



" Pa, everbyody can hear us." 

" You would n't care how much they heard, if 
you knew it," replies this accomplished devotee 
of learning. 



186 BADDECK, 



In another lull of the car- wheels we find that 
pa has skipped over to Marathon ; and this time 
it is the daughter who is asking a question. 

" Pa, what is a phalanx 1 " 

" Well, a phalanx — it 's a — it 's difficult to de- 
fine a phalanx. It 's a stretch of men in one line, — 
a stretch of anything in a line. When did Alex- 
ander flourish 1 " 

This domestic tyrant had this in common with 
the rest of us, that he was much better at asking 
questions than at answering them. It certainly 
was not our fault that we were listeners to his 
instructive struggles with ancient history, nor 
that we heard his petulant complaining to his 
cowed family, whom he accused of dragging him 
away on this summer trip. We are only grateful 
to him, for a more entertaining person the travel- 
ler does not often see. It was with regret that 
we lost sight of him at St. John. 

Night has settled upon New Brunswick and 
upon ancient Greece before we reach the Kenne- 
beckasis Bay, and we only see from the car win- 
dows dimly a pleasant and fertile country, and the 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 187 

peaceful homes of thrifty people. While we are 
running along the valley and coming under the 
shadow of the hill whereon St. John sits, with a 
regal outlook upon a most variegated coast and 
upon the rising and falling of the great tides of 
Fundy, we feel a twinge of conscience at the 
injustice the passing traveller must perforce do 
any land he hurries over and does not study. 
Here is picturesque St. John, with its couple of 
centuries of history and tradition, its commerce, 
its enterprise felt all along the coast and through 
the settlements of the territory to the northeast, 
with its no doubt charming society and solid Eng- 
lish culture ; and the summer tourist, in an idle 
mood regarding it for a day, says it is naught ! 
Behold what " travels " amount to ! Are they 
not for the most part the records of the misappre- 
hensions of the misinformed] Let us congi'atu- 
late ourselves that in this flight through the 
Provinces we have not attempted to do any jus- 
tice to them, geologically, economically, or histori- 
cally, only trying to catch some of the salient 
points of the panorama as it unrolled itself. Will 



188 BADDECK, 



Halifax rise up in judgment against us ] We 
look bacli upon it with softened memory, and 
already see it again in the light of history. It 
stands, indeed, overlooking a gate of the ocean, in 
a beautiful morning light ; and we can hear now 
the repetition of that profane phrase, used for the 
misdirection of wayward mortals, — " Go to Hal- 
ifax ! " — without a shudder. 

We confess to some regret that our journey is 
so near its end. Perhaps it is the sentimental 
regTet with which one always leaves the east, for 
we have been a thousand miles nearer Ireland 
than Boston is. Collecting in the mind the de- 
tached pictures given to our eyes in all these bril- 
liant and inspiring days, we realize afresh the 
variety, the extent, the richness of these north- 
eastern lands which the Gulf Stream pets and tem- 
pers. If it were not for attracting speculators, 
we should delight to speak of the beds of coal, the 
quarries of marble, the mines of gold. Look on 
the map and follow the shores of these peninsulas 
and islands, the bays, the penetrating arms of the 
sea, the harbors filled with islands, the protected 



AND THA T SORT OF THING. 189 

straits and sounds. All this is favorable to the 
highest commercial activity and enterprise. Greece 
itself and its islands are not more indented and 
inviting. Fish swarm about the shores and in all 
the streams. There are, I have no doubt, great 
forests which we did not see from the car win- 
dows, the inhabitants of which do not show them- 
selves to the travellers at the railway-stations. 
In the dining-room of a friend, who goes away 
every autumn into the wilds of Nova Scotia at 
the season when the snow falls, hang trophies — 
enormous branching antlers of the caribou, and 
heads of the mighty moose — which I am assured 
came from there ; and I have no reason to doubt 
that the noble creatures who once carried these 
superb horns were murdered by my friend at long- 
range. Many people have an insatiate longing to 
kill, once in their life, a moose, and would travel 
far and endure great hardships to gratify this 
ambition. In the present state of the world it is 
more difficult to do it than it is to be written 
down as one who loves his fellow-men. 

We received everywhere in the Provinces cour- 



190 BAD DECK, 



tesy and kindness, which were not based upon 
any expectation that we would invest in mines or 
railways, for the people are honest, kindly, and 
hearty by nature. What they will become when 
the railways are completed that are to bind St, 
John to Quebec, and make Nova Scotia, Cape 
Breton, and Newfoundland only stepping-stones 
to Europe, we cannot say. Probably they will 
become like the rest of the world, and furnish 
no material for the kindly persiflage of the trav- 
eller. 

Regretting that we could see no more of St. 
John, that we could scarcely see our way through 
its dimly lighted streets, we found the ferry to 
Carleton, and a sleeping-car for Bangor. It was 
in the heart of the negro porter to cause us alarm 
by the intelligence that the customs officer would 
search our baggage during the night. A search is 
a blow to one's self-respect, especially if one has 
anything dutiable. But as the porter might be 
an agent of our government in disguise, we pre- 
served an appearance of philosophical indifference 
in his presence. It takes a sharp observer to tell 



AND THAT SORT OF THING. 191 

innocence from, assurance. During the night, 
awaking, I saw a great light. A man, crawling 
along the aisle of the car, and poking under the 
seats, had found my travelling-bag and was " going 
through " it. 

I felt a thrill of pride as I recognized in this 
crouching figure an officer of our government, and 
knew that I was in my native land. 



THE END. 



APRl 



f r/ 



APR 16 1902 



